On a recent trip to Logan Martin in Alabama, I was introduced to shooting docks for crappie by 2019 Bassmaster Angler of the Year Scott Canterbury. Obviously Canterbury really enjoys catching bass, but he LOVES shooting docks for crappie. In fact, I haven’t seen a grown man this excited about anything in quite a while.
“Shooting docks for crappie is just fun man,” Canterbury said. “I love it. You shoot that thing in there and let it sink and they knock the fire out of it. I just love it. We’ll catch a hundred some days doing it and 50 sometimes off just one dock.”
So what exactly does “shooting a dock” mean? Well, it’s fairly easy to pick up and in itself, pretty cool. Canterbury takes a little 5-foot spinning rod, bends the rod by pulling back on the crappie jig and then releases the bait which lets the rod unload and fires the bait way back into places no one could possibly reach with a traditional cast.
“The trick is to let the jighead go a split-second before you take your other finger off the line at the reel.”
Gaining access to untapped water this way opens up a world off fish catching possibilities. Crappie stage on docks in a very particular way. They’ll often group tightly together and relate to one piece of cover, dock post or the darkest patch of shade.
“That’s the deal with shooting a dock,” said Canterbury. “You can cast all around it, but you can’t cast it back in there to the darkest shade or that particular piece of cover. Sometimes I’ll fish a massive dock with 15 poles under it and I’ll catch all the crappie on one pole.”