Keep in mind that Texoma is a two-state reservoir, so is a short boat ride across the lake to the Texas side, where some prime crappie fishing will be found in many similar areas.

I’ve experienced that good fishing firsthand on my own and while fishing with my wife’s uncle, Larry St. Clair, of Sherman. Top areas on the Texas side include the Paradise Cove area, Brushy Creek, and the creeks that feed into Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge. Other good areas can be found out west on the delta-formed flats west of Slickum Slough where the Red River empties into the lake.

Texoma isn’t the only southern Oklahoma late-season crappie honeyhole that Mauck recommends. Another is up Highway 69/75 at 5,700-acre Atoka Lake.

“I certainly wouldn’t overlook Atoka,” Mauck said, noting that the peak fishing usually begins in mid-April around Tax Day. “It is a dingy lake, but it has some really good white crappie in it.”

How good? “They’ll get to 3 pounds in Atoka,” Mauck continued. “They get really large there -- and we probably have some of our biggest crappie come out of Atoka. The reason for that? I think they live longer there and have some years to them. With a good shad base in there that has not been over utilized by the predators in there, the crappie get the benefit of all that.”

As for where to look for crappie at Atoka, the ODWC biologist recommended looking around the Highway 43 bridge, particularly on the riprap that lines the channel under the bridge. Another key area is in the Mill Creek area of Atoka.

Even when the water’s stained -- Mauck reported that you can sometimes see only a foot -- the lake’s crappie anglers express no really clear-cut preference in terms of minnows or jigs, as both seem to work equally well.

Moving a bit farther north toward central Oklahoma, Lake of the Arbuckles is a 2,346-acre lake in the Chickasaw National Recreation Area that Mauck rates as another prime late-spring crappie fishing honeyhole. “It’s another good lake with some good numbers of nice black and white crappie in there,” he said, noting that black crappie seem to do better in water bodies like Arbuckle and Broken Bow that have clearer water conditions.

With a lot of coves, water willow growing on the shoreline, submergent coontail alga (which has seen substantial growth in recent years), and brushpiles, Arbuckle features plenty of crappie habitat. “The lake’s three main coves -- Buckhorn, Guy Sandy, and Rock Creek -- have a lot of little coves within the bigger coves,” Mauck said. “That means that you can get into a wind-protected cove and, a lot of times, the crappie will move into those wind-protected coves to spawn.”

Once they do so, Mauck acknowledged, not many Arbuckle boathouses are baited up to hold crappie, so finding the fish in the post-spawn period, as the slabs move back out into deeper water, becomes a little more problematic. “People tell me later on they’ve caught them as deep as 50 feet,” he said. “So you’ve got to locate them first, because they’ll move out of deep water into shallow water and back out into deeper water as spring continues.”