The Crappie Chronicles team works to spread out and find fish as they roam through shallow areas.
Teamwork in all facets of fishing and show creation help make ‘The Crappie Chronicles’ successful. (Photo courtesy Adam Bartusek)
Crappie Chronicles Returns to YouTube
by Scott Mackenthun
The 2022-2023 ice fishing year will kick off the third season of “The Crappie Chronicles,” a YouTube video series that celebrates the passion, the drive, and the challenges of targeting and catching some of the largest crappie found in the United States by a team of four anglers in Minnesota.
In each season, team members Adam “Bart” Bartusek, Ryan “Pink” Pinkalla, Matt “Waldo” Waldron, and Adam “Griff” Griffith work to catch giant crappies in the Minneapolis and St. Paul Metropolitan area, teach skills for tracking down and catching behemoth crappies under the ice, and explore new and exciting approaches to cooking fresh crappie. The series is a crappie angling lover’s dream.
Bartusek, the creator behind the series as well as the videographer, editor, and veteran ice angler, describes the series as a labor of love that tests endurance and angler adaptation.
“It’s a lot of time on the water (or the ice),” Bartusek said. “There’s no substitute for that time on the water.”
After logging many hours and finding something with potential, it’s a group decision to go hard at their goal – to catch the largest crappies around through the ice. Once committed to a spot, it is about the adaptability of the team to fish together and the actual on-ice adaptation strategy.
“We chase fish that want to bite,” Bartusek said. “We don’t sit there and try to coax them. What we’ve found when ice fishing big crappies is that you can’t talk them into eating. You need to be there on a biting day.”
Bartusek said paying attention to electronics is important for reading fish moods. You may find fish high and active, or lower in the water column and sluggish. Position and movement are giveaways that tell the team whether they need to stay on the move to find the big bite or hunker down and pick apart a piece of structure.
The reason to produce such a unique video series?
The biggest crappies in the ice belt, the four men believe, are in the Minneapolis and St. Paul Twin Cities Metropolitan area.
“The area may not produce the biggest average when you look at some of the individual waterbodies,” said Bartusek. “If you want to catch a ton of 14-to-16-inch fish, go elsewhere. But if you want to find some huge top end crappie, over 16 or 17 inches, start looking within 60 miles of Minneapolis and St. Paul. If you see a huge crappie caught through the ice, oftentimes it’s a Twin Cities Area fish.”
The assembly of this elite team is no accident. Each member brings something unique to the collective. Bartusek is a passionate angler throughout the year, enjoying fishing in and covering professional bass leagues. Since losing his job at the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020, Bartusek pivoted to fulltime professional outdoor videography, making a living producing professional outdoor content. The “Crappie Chronicles” benefits from his unique approach to shooting and editing, keeping the cameras rolling, and his many hours of work behind the scenes.
“Matt Waldron is a very dedicated angler in general,” Bartusek said. “He’s a really good multispecies angler and he knows all the technology. Whether it’s the newest Vexilar model, or forward-f acing sonar, or mapping apps, he knows their inner workings. He also knows weather really well and takes a great interest in it. He can tell you what the weather is doing and how it is going to affect the fish. Overall, he just has a really analytical approach to fishing.”
Fishing guide Adam Griffith is a wiz with an ice rod in his hand. Bartusek said Griffith has spent his whole life chasing crappies in the Twin Cities. While the entire team on “The Crappie Chronicles” are good anglers, all the men are trying to keep up with “Griff.”
“You can’t talk them into eating. You need to be there on a biting day.” ~ Adam “Bart” Bartusek, The Crappie Chronicles
“Griff can catch anywhere from 3 to 10 fish to one for the rest of us. I don’t think there’s been a day that any of us have outfished Griff,” Adam notes.
Ryan Pinkalla is a magician on the ice and in the kitchen. He’s creative with his fishing and cooking, trying out new ideas and recipes with amazing results.
“Ryan loves showing people how to cook and he hates using the same recipe twice,” Bartusek said.
Bartusek notes that the group catches a lot of eater-sized fish while targeting the giants and so they get plenty of chances to prepare the fish in different ways.
“While a lot of people see Ryan as our cook, he’s also a really good angler. He’s a guy that can flat out catch ‘em,” Bartusek said.
Season 3 of “The Crappie Chronicles” will debut in December on Bartusek’s YouTube Page [The Crappie Chronicles]. New wrinkles for this year include the group spending some time using and teaching anglers how to use Humminbird Mega Live and Mega 360 to find fish and see how they behave. They’ll also spend time showing tips and tricks to get the best performance out of Vexilar flashers.
“Forward facing sonar is great for finding fish, but you still need the flasher for the catching portion,” Bartusek said.
With an instructional look at both methods, anglers can learn from “The Crappie Chronicles” team how to find and catch big crappies.
The entire team is excited for another season, where everything happens on the fly throughout the year.
“We have a group text and we’re constantly talking, constantly throwing out different lake names, thinking about where we are headed next,” Bartusek said. “What often happens behind the scenes is I get a call from the guys saying ‘it’s going on and the bite is now’ and I’ll abandon ship on edits and a scheduled release, grab cameras and head out on a moment’s notice and get to fishing. It usually happens 1 to 3 times a season. We’re looking for the big fish and you have to go when the fishing are biting. That’s what happened last year. I got the call, headed out there, and sure enough, Griff pulled up a 17-inch giant. It’s a chase to find 3- and 4-pound quality crappies.”
Scott Mackenthun is an outdoor columnist, fisheries biologist, and freelance outdoor writer from New Prague, Minnesota. He can be reached at scott.mackenthun@gmail.com.
