Young Cody Marchant displays the kind of crappie you can catch at Weiss this month -- if you can stand the cold! Photo by Kevin Dallmier.

Alabama has two capitals: the one in Montgomery, where the politicians hang out; and the one well to the northeast, near the town of Centre, where you'll find the center of gravity for crappie anglers -- Weiss Lake, a fertile, sprawling Alabama Power reservoir on the Coosa River. Widely hailed as the "Crappie Capital of the World," Weiss has consistently served as a papermouth factory since its impoundment in 1961.

At full pool the lake covers 30,200 acres and boasts 447 miles of shoreline. Many of those acres of water cover shallow stumpflats dropping off sharply into the river and creek channels that wend their way through the reservoir, creating channel ledges. And shallow wood and deep drops in a fertile lowland impoundment are just what the doctor ordered for some of the best winter crappie fishing you can ever hope to experience.

Like crappie lakes everywhere, Weiss gets the most attention from anglers in the early spring, when the fish are spawning. To ignore the papermouths for the rest of the year is to commit an error in judgment, though. The winter months too offer fishing of substantial quality. Winter crappie are in deeper water, so finding them is a little more difficult than it in springtime, but the payoff comes in stringers of truly nice fish. Locate a honeyhole, and you can fill the livewell in a hurry, even on a day that sees the wind cut to the bone and set your teeth chattering.

Three techniques -- bumpin', pullin', and pushin' -- excel for catching Weiss' winter crappie. Their names sound like NASCAR maneuvers, but in this case, they describe not the behaviors of cars and drivers as they circle the track, but methods that expert anglers use to catch impressive stringers of Weiss crappie. Let's take a look at each and some of the best places on Weiss to put them into play.

BUMPIN'
"Bumping bottom" is the superior approach for the inactive crappie commonly encountered during the hardest cold spells. It consists of vertically presenting a minnow by means of a dropper rig. Using dropper rigs with crappie is hardly a new idea, of course; the exceptional efficacy of bumpin' lies in the location in which selected for fishing the offering.

Crappie relate to ledges in the winter, and though it's generally a shallow lake, Weiss is blessed with plenty of ledges, some of the best of which are found in the Chattooga and Little River arms and Yellow Creek. Ledges are subtle structure, though, and finding these cold-weather crappie magnets may require some detective work with map and depthfinder.