Find the Best Crappie Spots BEFORE Fishing Unfamiliar Waters

Terry Blankenship looked forward to the test of catching crappie on unfamiliar waters when Crappie University president Gary Dollahon asked him to fish Lake Eucha.

“He kind of challenged us to come down and kind of look around and see if we could catch crappie and kind of figure it out,” Blankenship said of his invitation to the Oklahoma lake. I was invited to accompany Blankenship on the trip to the lake, which I did not even know existed.

Having never been to Eucha, Blankenship knew he needed to do some map research before we went to the lake because we only had a day and a half to fish. So, the 2026 Crappie University instructor went through a map study process at home to shorten the time we would have to search for key spots when we got on the water.

“Typically, when I am going to a new lake I always start with Google Earth and I will look the lake over and try to figure out if there is a river that comes in,” Blankenship said. “Time of year will dictate a lot of what I am looking for. So, in this case I Googled it and what I looked for was the main river. I really didn’t see a lot of water runoff there.” 

Eucha is a small lake (8.5 miles long) so Blankenship tried to compare it to the Grand Glaize arm on his home waters of massive Lake of the Ozarks, where he notices a lot of crappie migrate up the creek in the fall and then start coming back down the creek in late November and December. “So, my purpose was to go into the upper end of this lake and look for some crappie that might have migrated down the river,” said Blankenship of his Plan A for Eucha.  

The next step of Blankenship’s map study was to look over his LakeMaster electronic mapping on his Humminbird XPLORE unit. “I wound up studying a lot of the lake’s channel swings, which are always just a good place to start, being we had never been to this lake,” Blankenship said. “As I was looking through the map I found quite a few channel swings.” 

His LakeMaster mapping showed channel swings and steep drop-offs as contour lines bunched together. “Whenever you see those lines really close together in one area you know that is where it really drops fast,” Blankenship said. When he found am area with tight contour lines, Blankenship zoomed in on the area, which showed him the depth of each contour line.

Our fishing trip was planned for mid-December so Blankenship looked on his mapping for areas where crappie could move from the shallows to deep water in a hurry or just deep-water holes. “I was trying to size it up from the shallow water to the deep water and bluff pockets and deep coves,” Blankenship said.

“It really minimized my time to try and locate these spots than trying to go out there in the boat and graph it out.”

During his map study, Blankenship marked about 20 waypoints of channel swings and steep drop-offs. “I wanted to make as many waypoints as I possibly could, and whether or not we even got to them, I wanted to make sure I had already searched the lake a little bit.”  

Blankenship estimated he spent about an hour studying Google Earth and his LakeMaster electronic mapping in preparation for our trip to Eucha. No one he knew fished Eucha, so he was unable to count on a local help, and he just had to rely on the maps for good starting points.  

“I just went with what I like to do and where I like to find crappie, and where I find fish a lot is on channel swings,” he said. “Just from past history I know that channel swings are always a prime spot to check in the wintertime.” 

A few days before our trip, Oklahoma experienced some cold winter weather with temperatures dropping into the 20-degree range at night. During our drive to Eucha, I noticed some of the small ponds in that region were ice covered, and when we arrived at the lake the temperatures were in the upper 30s.

Blankenship started out with Plan A of searching the shallower upper end of the lake. While idling around the upper end, he relied on side and down scanning to search for crappie, cover and baitfish.

We spent a couple of hours graphing and fishing the upper end, but Blankenship didn’t find many spots holding crappie. When we found some promising spots, Blankenship would pinpoint crappie with his Humminbird Mega 360 and Mega Live 2 features. While watching the forward-facing sonar, we noticed those crappie continued to ignore our lures.

The shallow bite never materialized so we went on to Plan B, moving to deeper water in the mid-lake area. Blankenship side scanned some of his waypoints of main lake channel swings, but those spots lacked brush or standing timber for holding crappie. We then moved into deeper coves where Blankenship had marked waypoints along the first channel swings entering the coves.

We found about a half dozen places that were holding crappie. Most fish were hanging around deep water. The big crappie we caught were over deep water with a big tree, and most of the fish that came from there were not much more than 6 to 8 feet deep. The prime spot was a channel swing 30 to 35 feet deep with a submerged tree that stood within 6 feet of the surface.

Map study at home helped Blankenship and me catch quality crappie on our first trip to Eucha. I weighed a 1.81-pound crappie, and Blankenship caught some crappie of equal size or bigger.

“I would have hated to go down there and try to figure the lake out without the mapping,” Blankenship said.

The map study helped us catch as many or more crappie than some of the locals we talked to on the water and at the boat ramp. The guys in one boat said they had only caught three crappie, and the other guys we saw at the ramp said they only caught one drum all day.

• History from your favorite lake. Seasonal patterns that produce on your favorite lake probably also work on unfamiliar waters.
• YouTube videos. Local anglers or guides may have posted YouTube videos of the fishing on a lake you will be visiting for the first time.
• Search engines such as Google to find websites about the lake’s fishing.
• Facebook pages devoted to the lake’s fishing.
• Local bait and tackle shops for the latest fishing report.
• Anglers you know who frequently fish the lake.
• Conservation or wildlife agency apps or websites might have fishing reports or fish sampling results about the lake.
• The tackle you need from Bobby Garland Crappie Baits.