“You need to change your fish call from here fishy, fishy to here crappie, crappie,” commented Gary Lindsay during our first day of fishing for the big papermouths on Lake Enid. John Mickish, Gary, and I left for what has become an annual October outing to the crappie producing lakes in Mississippi on my birthday, October 13th. The other half of the Walleye Wisdom fishing team–Tracy Hayward, Mike, and Larry–followed us down. We did make a stop at the Bass Pro Shops Pyramid in Memphis to see what people have talked about since Johnny Morris spent lots of $$ to create a destination spot for folks interested in the outdoors. We arrived at the George P. Cosar State Park on the south side of Lake Enid on Monday and started fishing the next day. We fished a total of four days on Enid with a couple trips down the road to Grenada Lake. We did catch bigger crappie on Grenada but the numbers were down from last year. Record high water this past spring and the traditional fall draw down may have changed the crappie locations we found last year. We still caught many nice fish over 12 inches long with our boat making sure they were well over the 12 inch minimum. We caught numerous 14 inchers with our biggest a 16 incher Gary caught on Grenada. Unlike everyone else we saw fishing, our two boats caught them pulling crank baits. Tracy’s group did the “spider rig” thing for a couple days and had good success. I set up the Ranger 620 with a Traxstech rod holder system late this summer and we experimented early in the week running our 7-foot trolling rods from two three rod “trees” while we ran another rod straight out the side of the boat on the Traxstech system and a “shortie” rod straight off the back from the Modog rod holder system we added last year. You can run four rods for each angler but ten seemed to work best for us. All our fish came on Berkley Flicker Shads in the #7 length. Best colors were sick perch, Hollywood (what we call it), red craw and a couple custom colors I brought along. The baits were run from 21 feet to 41 feet of Offshore Planer Boards. We experimented running a couple baits deeper straight off the back but most of our catch came from the board baits. You are only fishing in 8-12 feet of water so we found the crappies were hanging out toward the top of the water column. The Evinrude E-tec 250 got us out to our spots while the 15hp provided power and the MinnKota Ulterra provided direction– we trolled anywhere from 1.5 to 1.9mph. We did have a combined meal with Tracy’s team at a great Grenada restaurant called Jake and Rips–you may want to get at least one meal there! Our week’s weather warmed up a little each day with Sunday’s temps in the low 80’s. We left early, early Monday morning, the 21st, missed the tornadoes near Memphis but had the 45 mph tailwind all the way home. Gary and John helped me unload the Ranger once we reached Walleye Wisdom headquarters so we could let all the compartments dry out completely. I want to thank each of them for sharing a week with me on their first ever crappie fishing trip South! It takes me a couple afternoons to organize baits/gear and put away until the next time. I’m leaving next Wednesday with friend Jim Wessels for a walleye fishing school at Lake Erie with Lance Valentine plus some bonus night fishing looking for the “big one” to win the Walleye Fall Brawl on Lake Erie!! Thank you for reading our story, checking out the pictures, and following along on Old Spike’s fishing adventures!