"Bump!"

    A super hard strike on my line vibrated up the line down through the handle, tickling my palms and telling me it was time to set the hook. 

    Or was it?

    When I reeled up there was nothing on the other end...well...except for a shiner smashed by some kind of fish haunting the brush pile we were fishing.

    "That's probably a really big white crappie. The bigger ones have been hitting us on this pile really hard and then backing off. Let them hit, wait a few seconds and then set the hook," said my friend and expert Sam Rayburn guide Roger Bacon.

    After hooking another shine, I lowered it over the exact same spot and it didnít take long for get another ìbumpî although this one was even harder.

    One-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one-thousand...set!

    Roger's trick worked and instead of a mashed minnow, I had a two plus pound white crappie, the kind that makes anglers like myself obsess over the species and salivate at the dining prospects.

    For the rest of our trip, we used the method for the hard strikes and caught numerous monster crappie on this spot and others on the lake.

    My wife Lisa and I brought home a nice mess of fish to fry but I also brought home something else: a revelation on the intricacies of trophy-sized crappie strikes. 

    Back in 2005, I had the amazing opportunity to dive with and hand feed "Splash", the 121-pound blue catfish caught by angler Cody Mullenix on Lake Texoma. The fish was brought in alive and housed at the Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center in Athens. My goal for the dive was to establish the perspective of a diver encountering a catfish of record proportions for an article I was doing about the legends of giant catfish below dams.

    Before the dive, the divemaster handed me a mesh bag with a few koi and a rainbow trout to feed ìSplashî and another full of shiners and crickets to feed the bass and perch. After achieving the goal of hand feeding the giant catfish and having someone photograph to show the scale of such a huge catfish and a grown man, I took a few minutes to feed the other fish.

    My eyes were immediately drawn to a massive crappie in the tank. The fish had to be every bit of three pounds and as soon as I broke out the food it started my direction.

    I held out a shiner toward it and was amazed as the fish slowly swam up to it, stopped and then blew a hard jet of water over my shiner (and my fingers) a second or two before lunging forward and inhaling it. The fish repeated this process every time as I observed with astonishment. It was extremely cautious on the approach then came the blast of water followed by the attack.

    After catching of few of these super-sized slabs on Rayburn, it did not take long to connect the dots between my diving experience and the bites of these big fish. These trophy crappie in my opinion were either testing or shocking the bait before the strike.

   I know that might be a controversial statement but over the last year I have began to notice traits that separate the truly big fish from the smaller ones in virtually every species, crappie included. There are several key traits that would require an entire series of articles it discuss at the proper length but for this story weíll deal with caution.

   For a fish to reach its maximum potential size requires age above every other factor. Genetics are certainly at play and so is nutrition. 

    However, if a fish with the genetic coding to become a world record in waters loaded with nutrients gets put in an ice chest when it barely reaches legal size you have no record fish. Either chance, conditioning or perhaps something in the DNA itself causes certain fish to be extra cautious and avoid biting anything that appears unusual without some sort of test or closer examination.

    When observing the fish feed from outside the tank, I never noticed the crappie doing anything other than gobbling it up, however when I entered the tank and offered it a fish, the huge crappie acted with caution.

    Have I caught big crappie that bit differently than the ones we caught at Rayburn? You bet I have but after thinking about it, the majority of really big ones were more finicky than the smaller ones.

     There is no guarantee with a fish bite but I can just about guarantee that all truly big specimens are more cautious about what the inhale than their smaller counterparts. I have if you could observe a brush pile you would see all kinds of crappie, some that strike with great fury, huge ones that sit back and watch along with younger ones that inherently sense something is not right. Those are the ones destined to be super slabs.

Chester Moore, Jr. is The News Outdoors Editor. To contact Chester Moore, e-mail him at cmoore@fishgame.com. You can hear him on the radio Fridays from 6-7 p.m. on Newstalk AM 560 KLVI or online at www.klvi.com.