That the water is deep right along the dam has spawned a unique manner of fishing for Hefner’s crappie. “It’s a pretty good walk to get from the road down to the riprap,” Gilliland said. “A technique that crappie anglers use there is a slip-bobber, and they may fish it anywhere from 10 to 30 feet deep. They’ll make a long cast offshore and fish vertically with the slip-bobber, most using jigs instead of minnows. There’s a pretty good group of hardcore crappie anglers that have perfected this technique. They’ll use 10-foot rods, slip-bobbers, light line, tiny jigs and fish up to 75 feet offshore in water 20 and 30 feet deep.”

Does it work? “A lot of times, these anglers are catching suspended crappie,” the biologist said. “The water may be 40 or 50 feet deep right there off the dam where they’re casting.”

Sound complicated? Gilliland referred those needing guidance to the lake’s crappie gurus, who tend to gather at Hefner Bait & Tackle on the lake’s west side. There, most anglers will eagerly help newbies get rigged up, and show them how to catch the suspended slabs.

“These guys are very open and willing to tell guys how to do this,” Gilliland said. “They’ll help get them rigged up with equipment and show them how to do it, because it’s not a secret society of how to do it or anything like that; they’re real good in wanting other people to catch them, too.”

A possible sleeper lake to consider -- depending on water conditions -- for a late-spring crappie fishing outing is 1,142-acre Wes Watkins Lake. “I don’t know if the crappie population will be sustained out there at Wes Watkins,” Gilliland said, “because it is a fairly young lake. The same thing that has happened in two or three other lakes might happen there: The lake was impounded; the crappie were among the first species to get started. The ones that got there in the first two or three years had no competition, and so they got pretty big. At some point, however, the population starts building, the competition for food increases, and that competition will slow the growth rate down.”

Will that happen at Wes Watkins? “Well, I didn’t hear nearly as much about Wes Watkins this year as compared to the last couple of years,” Gilliland said. “Some of that could be due to low water conditions, drought, and water usage from Shawnee.”

Gilliland offered that while Wes Watkins has had a good crappie run going in recent years, he’s not overly optimistic about its future at this point, given both his theory and the fact that Shawnee’s main water-supply lake has been plagued by serious drought conditions. “If it doesn’t fill up, then they’ll rely more heavily on water from Wes Watkins,” he said. “I don’t know about recruitment either, because there is a lot of good spawning area up on the dry bank for both crappie and bass too. Crappie aren’t a real long-lived species, and that means that things that happened a couple of years ago can have a big impact on crappie. They only live 3 to 5 years, while bass live 8 to 10 years.”