An abundance of trees was flooded when the reservoir was built in the 1970s. He specializes in fishing flooded timber rather than isolated brush piles, and El Dorado holds a lot of it. That may be a factor in the increased size (of crappies).”įrank Haidusek is a believer, too. “Now that we’ve knocked their (white perch) population way back, we’ve seen growth rates of game fish take off. “We feel the white perch may have been competing with many species, crappie included, for food and habitat,” Nygren explained. Listed as an invasive and a nuisance species in Kansas waters, state fisheries officials have been encouraging the harvest of white perch. All of this has long supported El Dorado’s good crappie population, but the boom in fish quality hasn’t been seen until recent years.ĭoug Nygren, chief of fisheries for the KDWP, theorizes that recent developments might have something to do with the downward trend of white perch in the lake. It features acres of flooded timber and brush murky, fertile water and an abundance of gizzard shad. The 8,000-acre reservoir, located about 35 miles northeast of Wichita, simply looks like good crappie water. Granted, the tournament took place during the spawn, when some of the females were still heavy with eggs nonetheless, those catches served as an eye-opening example of why El Dorado is arguably Kansas’ best big-crappie reservoir these days. We caught all of them in one 50-yard stretch.”įour more fishing teams that day joined Niemeyer and German with big catch results, each totaling more than 12 pounds. Those big crappies were grouped up in one spot. “We found these fish in a patch of timber on the main lake. “A lot of fishermen think that crappie only spawn on the banks, but that’s not true,” says Niemeyer, who lives in Gardner.
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