I also just found out this year how good crappie really are. I' m from Ontario Canada and as you know winter is long up here. Myself and a couple buddies put an ice shack out on the lake looking for walleye but ended up catching many more crappie than pike and walleye put together. All we were using was a minnow and a hook. We avereged 30-40 crappie per night. We threw alot back but kept everything over 11" . My biggest was just over 14.5" .
This spring we decided to try to catch some out of the boat. We were using 1/32oz
jig heads and 1" power grubs in various colours. You could slam them all day with this setup.