His hat is appropriate as crappie guide Haydn Williams is often “On ‘em” as he fishes boat
docks on Grand Lake o’ the Cherokees in Oklahoma to catch big crappies. (Photo: Brent Frazee)
A Grand Place to Fill Your Livewell
by Brent Frazee
Haydn Williams looked at the screen of the forward-facing sonar on his boat and saw the crappie fishing equivalent of the jackpot.
The screen was filled with a live view full of crappies – hundreds of them milling around from 15 to 35 feet down.
The giant school was suspended in an empty boat stall on Grand Lake O’ the Cherokees in Oklahoma, a picture that illustrated why the reservoir’s crappie fishing has become nationally known.
“There are crappies that never leave the docks on this lake,” said Williams, 23, who operates Williams Guide Service. “They live there. They have everything they need there – shade, food, spawning habitat, even a place to get away from fishing pressure. They live a pretty good life.”
The fishermen do, too
Grand Lake, a 46,500-acre impoundment in northeast Oklahoma, is covered with private boat docks. That translates to hundreds of man-made structures to fish.
The reservoir was clear-cut of all its trees when it was built in the 1940s. But government fisheries workers and fishermen have sunk numerous brush piles to compensate for that lack of natural cover. Add the structure provided by rows of boat docks, and Grand has more crappie habitat than meets the eye.
The fish often stage on the deep-water docks near the river channel, then they work their way to the shallower docks to spawn in April and May.
Williams and a guide client, Greg Thompson of Liberty, Mo., fished one of those deep docks on a warm day in late February.
As Williams studied the screen of his forward-facing sonar that showed real-time movement of what lay below, he saw a shad drift out of a tight school of shad. A crappie shot up and quickly inhaled the baitfish.
Williams chose to target one of the larger marks on the screen and dropped his lure just above its face. When he slowly raised the lure, the fish followed and eventually couldn’t resist. It inhaled the jig and Williams set the hook.
For the next couple hours, Williams and Thompson dropped jigs to crappies suspended under boat docks and ended up with an impressive number of fish in the live well.
No, it wasn’t easy. Even by pinpointing big fish with the Livescope, many of the crappies swam up to the jigs, then shied away. Some of them even followed the steady ascent of the jigs to within a few feet of the surface before turning away.
But the law of averages meant Williams was able to locate enough cooperative fish to make for a successful day.
He followed a predictable routine. He used the side imaging on his electronics to locate schools of crappies under the docks, then he relied on his Livescope to get close enough to fish vertically.
He dropped a one-eighth-ounce jig and played a “cat-and-mouse” game with the bigger fish, trying to tease them into hitting.
“Some of my best docks don’t even have brush in them,” Williams said. “The crappies will just suspend in the water below these deep docks before they come in to spawn. You can go to one dock and have everyone in the boat limit out (15 fish, 10 inches or longer daily).”
Anglers can fish the water around those private docks, provided they are mindful of regulations that require them to stay on their boats and not trespass on private property. That is, not get out on the docks themselves.
Williams follows a milk run of docks and brush piles that he has gathered over the years. His family moved to Grand Lake when he was in kindergarten and it wasn’t long before he was joining his father, Jeff, a well-known lure manufacturer, on fishing trips.
“We would go out and test the lures he would make,” Haydn said of his of father, who at the time was owner of Fle-Fly Lures and now operates Luck-E-Strike Lures.
“We would make videos of some of his products, and I would be in them. That was always a lot of fun.”
Williams fulfilled his childhood dream of becoming a guide on Grand almost five years ago, and has never looked back.
He is busy – even in the heat of summer. He often books two trips a day, and comes in with limits of crappies even when others are struggling.
“The thing about summer is that it’s consistent,” he said. “You can catch fish on a brush pile one day and go back to the same spot the next day and they haven’t moved.”
Williams fishes with minnows in the heat of summer, but uses plastics that his dad’s companies manufacture the rest of the year.
He considers himself fortunate to guide on a lake such as Grand. It is a crappie factory and has been for as long as he can remember. Williams has caught crappie as big as 3 pounds. His largest fish on Grand came in May after the spawn had concluded.
“That fish would have been bigger if it was still carrying its eggs,” he said.
Though it does have some trophies, crappies that big are rare at Grand. The Oklahoma reservoir is best known for its consistent numbers of keeper fish.
“Our crappie fishing has been lights-out for several years now,” said Brad Johnston, northeast regional supervisor for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation. “We haven’t lost a year-class of fish for some time now.
“We have lots of 10- to 12-inch fish and fair numbers of fish in the 13- to 14-inch range. Our crappies get a lot of pressure, especially in the spring, but the population holds up.”
Learn more about Oklahoma crappie fishing here.
Brent Frazee is an award-winning writer and photographer from the Kansas City area. He was outdoors editor for The Kansas City Star for 36 years before retiring in 2016. He continues to write for magazines, websites and tourism bureaus.
