The Masters golf championship every April reminds me about one of the great spring traditions.

Certainly, the Masters is all about golf, as Augusta National blooms forth in full springtime glory. The azaleas and dogwoods pop on my TV screen in colorful contrast to the rich green of the greens and fairways.

But Georgia has no corner on the spring season. The emerging flowers and budding trees here in Northeast Ohio are our annual reminder that the best crappie fishing of the season is hitting full stride.

We are particularly fortunate in the Youngstown and Warren areas to have good crappie fishing at several big reservoirs. Mosquito and Pymatuning are highly rated crappie lakes, but Berlin, West Branch and Shenango Reservoir north of Sharon, Pa., are pretty good, too.

As the dogwood trees at Augusta whisper “Masters” to golf fans, I believe their Ohio cousins call us to our crappie waters. Dad planted that dogwood seed in my head many years ago, and I still associate the blooming trees with Ohio crappie fishing.

Soon the woods will be in full flower and anglers will be lugging their spinning rods, jigs and minnow buckets to their favorite crappie hotspots.

I particularly staking out good stands of flooded willows and buckbrush, both of which are abundant around the shorelines of Pymatuning and Mosquito.

One-sixteenth-ounce jigs dressed in marabou or sporting tube bodies are my go-to crappie baits. I carry three colors – chartreuse, pink and white – which get the job done most any time I’m on the water.

I like to sweeten the deal with a waxworm or maggot, though a wiggly, inch-long minnow also is pretty hard for a hungry crappie to resist.

My spinning reels are spooled with 6- or 8-pound test fluorocarbon and mounted on six-foot light-action rods.

I thread a rubber bobber stopper on the fluoro and add a quill-style slip bobber. My initial depth setting is three to four feet, which I will vary by six to 12 inches until I find the depth at which the slab crappies are suspending.

Crappies love vertical cover, which they find in abundance on our local reservoirs when they have risen to spring-time levels. Spring rains certainly bring flowers, but they also pull the crappies in to feast and spawn.

Good days can serve up easy limits, but the fishing isn’t always easy. I advise anglers to pull up and move if 15 minutes of fishing time hasn’t resulted in bites. Crappies tend to hang tight to good cover when they find it, so if you aren’t getting bit, it means you aren’t around fish.

Remember to obey the length and bag limits. Ohio sets 9 inches as the minimum length. Anglers are limited to 30 crappies per day.

Jack Wollitz believes the first fish he ever caught was a Berlin Reservoir crappie. Contact him at jackbbaass@gmail.com.