Forward facing sonar - fishing tech

[sandbur]

If it's a managed lake, I'd do some electrofishing and find out what you've got going on. Bass are a plague in a lake and can eat the hell out of everything. I think @sandbur could be on to something with poor recruitment. If the cover isn't there to protect the crappie when they hatch, the bass can clean them all up quickly.

When Upper Red was netted into a walleye collapse, the crappie population exploded and was something that will never happen again. Giant collapse in predators produced a legendary boom of crappie. I'd keep every bass in that lake and get a 100 yard load of sawdust and make compost out of all of them.

I suspect that in our natural lakes of that size, water temperature fluctuations, wind, erratic weather swings that last days in the spring, and other factors cause cycles in crappie populations. There are probably limited spawning sites compared to bigger lakes. Netting is not a factor in most smaller lakes.

Now we can add zebra mussels as a factor and I guess bass numbers are increasing.

Still crappie populations cycled for 50 years that I can remember.