Before heading out, take some time to recall where you had your best success with spawning crappie last year and in previous seasons. Mark those spots on a topo map of your favorite lake, and then look at the adjacent areas on the map.

Do you see some spots with deep water -- say, 15 to 20 feet -- close by? Remember what Austin said: You should be looking within just a few hundred yards of those spawning banks. Do any of those deeper spots have structure on them -- rocks or a brushpile, or maybe a hard clay bottom? If so, check them out first to see whether any crappie are there.

Chances appear to be good that they will be. "They also can just suspend in open water," Austin explained, "but they prefer to use some kind of structure in that depth range if it's available. I would look for those kinds of places before I'd look for them to be suspended."

You also should expect April's dynamic weather to affect whether you catch crappie. And in this regard, "dynamic" isn't necessarily a good thing.

"The least little bit of a front often gives crappie lockjaw," Austin said. "I've seen that first-hand. Even after the spawn begins in earnest; if you get a little bit of a front move through, crappie will leave the beds and move out to deep water again. They'll return when things stabilize. But some years, the spawn isn't as successful as we'd like, because weather gets those fish yo-yoing from spawning beds to deeper water, and they finally just give up."

In talking about the way various Kansas species differ in their movements, Austin recounted the story of one particular fish on Glen Elder Reservoir that amazed him with its determination.

"We know that species like walleyes and white bass move around a lake much more than crappie do," he said. "But there was one white bass on Glen Elder that I still tell people about. He took that movement to another level."

Austin recalled that, during this particular sampling effort associated with the white bass spawn, he wanted to capture and tag 1,000 different fish. "I didn't want to worry about whether we were going to pick up the same fish every day," he explained, "so we carried them about seven miles and released them near the dam." He was capturing the whites in a spot up the North Fork of the Solomon River.

"The second day we were out, I shocked up one of the males that we'd captured and tagged the day before, then released seven miles away," Austin said. "That really surprised me. But we took him back down to the dam with the rest of the fish we captured and tagged that day and released him again."