Wintertime crappie action in North Alabama is different from what most anglers expect when it comes to fishing for one of the state's leading game fish. Winter water temperatures have moved the fish far from the bank and placed them in deep water -- so this is no time for cork-and-minnow fishing.

Gil Sipes displays the kind of slab that he and his cousin, Coy, take from Neely Henry Lake. Photo by Phillip Gentry.

The good news is that if you bring the right tactics and the right attitude to the water, the pursuit of wintertime crappie can result in some of the best angling -- and biggest fish -- of the year.

The Crappie Masters Tournament Trail is one of the most popular competitive circuits in the country. Known for having some of the largest payouts ever for a national trail, Crappie Masters draws the best teams from around the country to compete for points for the Crappie Masters Angler Team of the Year.

Two of the most consistently ranked teams hail from Alabama: the Blakemore Roadrunner team of cousins Gil and Coy Sipes and the father-and-son Foodsource team of Steve and Kevin McElroy. These guys know their sport!

THE SIPES COUSINS: NEELY HENRY LAKE
The Roadrunner Fishing Team won the Crappie Masters National Classic at Grenada Lake, Miss., in 2004, setting the mark for the highest recorded weight for a two-day weigh-in with 10 fish that combined for 37.88 pounds. Gil and Coy Sipes feel confident that this world-record tournament weight will likely never be topped -- not least because the tournaments have reduced fish limits to seven per day.

Gil hails from Moody, while Coy lives in Pell City, so the team considers Neely Henry to be their home lake, which is in part due to the amount of time the two spend planting brushpiles and stakebeds in the Coosa River impoundment.

During the winter months, the Sipes team will be found tightlining small Roadrunner Jigs tipped with live minnows over the tops of these locations. "Coy and I spend a lot of time putting structure into Neely Henry," Gil Sipes stated, "and when the weather gets cold, crappie move into that structure and we'll spider-rig double rigs down to them around 12 to 14 feet deep. We use a special double rig with a minnow on a Tru-Turn hook above a small marabou Roadrunner Jig tipped with a live minnow."

The Sipeses meet with their best success by fishing beds in the Greensport area. Their particular favorites are Beaver Creek and Big Canoe Creek. They concentrate their efforts on the mouths of the creeks and then adjust back into the feeders along the creek channel as the water temperatures and weather dictate.

"A lot of times," Gil said, "those fish are coming up after bait when the sun gets up during the day. Believe it or not, they can get pretty active. We'll slow-troll around the brush working back toward the creek channel looking for bait on the graph. Once you find the bait, the crappie won't be far behind."