There is no question about it. Every Crappie angler wants every opportunity to hook into some extra slabs whenever they get the chance. In order to do that, one must first use the correct bait. What bait is that? Well, you could always just use live minnows to catch your Crappie but what fun is that? Keeping and using minnows is often a very tedious and arduous task. First, you have to purchase them from a bait shop or go out and catch them. After that, you have to worry about keeping the minnows alive which can prove to be very difficult.

You will likely require an aeration system for your minnows so they don’t suffocate after a few minutes. Then you may need to treat the water with various compounds so it is suitable for the minnows to live in. After that, you have to worry about maintaining this delicate balance throughout the rest of the time you plan on keeping them. If you don’t go through all of these steps without error, this often leaves you hanging with a plastic bag or cooler full of dead fatheads or shiners. You can try that, or use a prepared bait that does a lot of the work for you.

Berkley has come out with a great product that essentially removes your need for keeping and using minnows as Crappie bait completely. It comes in a jar. They call the product Crappie Nibbles. This product is also helpful for catching Crappie with jigs. You can tip them on your jigs or hook them. Fish attractant really works and can help you land much more fish. This product is one of the best at doing that. Today we will be attempting to present one of the best Crappie Nibbles reviews on the internet.

---

Product: Chroma-Glow Crappie Nibbles                                                            

Manufacturer: Berkley

Type Of Lure: Prepared Bait

Bait Quality: Excellent

Value: Excellent

Ease Of Use: Excellent

My Rating: 5 Stars

The Crappie Truth

When you consider Crappie fishing, it pretty much boils down to a couple of things. The first one of them is the location. I cannot stress that enough. Skimping on your location if you are after Crappie can be very harmful to your success. If you are after Crappie at all, you cannot afford to procrastinate about where to find them. It is the single most important feature you will ever come across in Crappie fishing. Any structure that provides shade from the sun is often the best place to find Crappie. The second thing you need to consider is the bait used.

Crappie are not very picky eaters and they will consume just about anything they can successfully catch. This includes worms, crickets, other insects, crustaceans and other creatures. Even so, this does not mean that they are not somewhat selective. Smaller Crappie will often search for crustaceans and insects while larger specimens almost always go for small fish. Keep in mind that the single best food for any Crappie anywhere in the world is small fish.

Smaller Crappie usually do not eat these as much because they cannot often swallow them correctly. If however, the bait is small enough, the Crappie will not hesitate to give the small fish a good chomp or five. Keep those two important factors in mind. Location and bait will always make a successful Crappie angler successful. Always.

How Well Do These Baits Attract Fish?

In my experience, the attraction of these baits is on par even with the performance of live minnows. Infused with the Powerbait exclusive formula which is like a fish catching elixir, Berkley has produced a product that drives the Crappie and other panfish wild. For whatever reason, this bait has fully replaced the live minnows and worms that I used to take Crappie fishing. I guess the scent and flavor is something many fish cannot resist passing up.

The bait itself is made of natural ingredients and is the result of over 25 years of experimentation by Scientists and fish experts. As odd as it may seem, these baits dissolve very slowly in the water yet do a great job of alerting fish to its presence. They leave a trail of scent and flavor inside of the water. Since they glow in the dark, night fishing is easier on the angler. They come in many different colors from brights and neons to dark blues and greens with a hint of glitter added for extra appeal. There really is a jar of nibbles for every fisherman.

How Long Will They Last?

The answer to this question must first be defined correctly. If you are wondering how long they will last in your tackle box without getting old, smelly, or moldy, this would be a very long time. If you are wondering how quickly they get used up, the answer is very very slowly. They stay on the hook extremely well and it isn’t easy for a fish to pull it off.

I  have personally maxed out on my daily limit of Crappie before I lost a bait. Even when I did, I just hooked another one on and kept fishing.  I had hundreds available to me and they cost me next to nothing. Do not worry about how long they will last. At the absolute minimum, if you lose a bait every fish, a jar like this will easily last you six months. That is only assuming that you keep losing baits. Most of the time, the fish do not perform that way. Usually, they allow you to catch much fish without having to switch it out.

Can You Fish Them At Night?

You can certainly fish these baits to successfully hook into Crappie even in low light conditions. Called Chroma-Glow for a reason, Berkley went above and beyond what many Crappie anglers would even consider fair to the fish. These baits glow in the dark! Not only that but the color that it glows changes with the color of the bait.

If you want a glowing chartreuse Crappie bait, make sure your jar of nibbles is the chartreuse color. If you are after a glow in the dark bait full of blue sparkling glitter so it looks like fish scales, they offer that as well. You can fish them at night, in the shadows, under boat docks, and even in very deep water without to much trouble.

What Is The Value Of These Baits?

The amount of Crappie you receive for one jar of baits is simply incredible. You will fill up many livewells with daily limits before you run out of bait to use. I have done it. Just one of these small containers will house a couple of hundred baits and even then, you can usually get 7 to 10 fish off of one nibble because it stays on the hook so well. Try accomplishing that using worms or fathead minnows. They cost much less than both. Usually, about 20 small fathead minnows will run you about 6 or 7 dollars excluding the container used to store them in.

That is around 18 cents a minnow! Worms normally come in packages of 10 to 30 to 50, costing you near the same price. That means that you as an angler have an expensive way of getting fish bait. For example, I decided to go with the top 3 search results when I gave the minnows a price lookup to prove a point. Minnows are not as cheap as one would think. I decided to type inside of the Google search engine to see their most relevant results. I entered the words, “fathead minnows retail price” and Google brought back a few different search results that are pretty consistent with one another.

The very first search result was out of stock but that is okay. I decided instead to go with the second, third, and fourth search results instead. The first depicted example is taken from the trusted Jones Fish website who is primarily Lake Management Specialists. Upon closer inspection, anglers would be paying 15 dollars for one pound of minnows!  No thank you.

The next example comes from yet another brand trusted in the fish industry called Smith Creek. They are fish farm managers and specialize in the stocking of water bodies. Turns out that even these guys are still charging one dollar for every six minnows. No thank you again if you are a Crappie angler.

Last, of the three, we have the Aqua Culture Store who is pretty much self-explanatory. Still, anglers will be paying 5 dollars a pound for Fathead Minnows and that also includes the water! No offense, but that is heavy on the wallet especially if you aspire to be a great Crappie angler who often loses a minnow to a nice fish every other cast.

The craziest and saddest part of this reality is that purchasing worms online are not that much better. The one advantage that worms do have over minnows is their availability. Most local bait stores carry Red Wrigglers or European Nightcrawlers exclusively for fishing bait if you don’t have access to the internet. Since you are reading this post, however, you would probably prefer to purchase online anyways just for convenience purposes. If you think you can get a great deal on your worms at the bait store down the street for your house, more power to you.

If you keep their body temperature constant, and if you allow them to stay moist, you can keep worms alive pretty much anywhere. I typed a specific term into the Google search engine. My term was, “buy fishing worms”. The very first result that came up in Google was a website under the name of Speedy Worms. Seems to be a great sight and the reviews for the European Nightcrawlers seem to be unmatched. Even so, for 100 worms cost 8 dollars. That is 12 and a half cents a worm! For what it is worth, as a Crappie angler, they will go quickly. All 100 will be used up in no time.

If you are a typical Crappie fisherman that likes to keep fish, this will be a problem. In most states, the bag limit a day for Crappie is 30. That means that if you manage to catch a Crappie on every single worm before they take it, you will be able to last three good fishing days with this amount plus 10 extra fish. For an angler that prefers to release the catch, it is entirely possible to burn through your entire bait bucket in one day, before it is time to buy more worms.

For many anglers, having to spend 8 dollars every three fishing days just isn’t going to happen. Another option for getting worms is to catch them yourself. This, however, is not a reliable way to get fishing bait. They like to hang out in the ground and trying to catch them every time you go Crappie fishing just isn’t practical especially if you have physical limitations, prefer not getting your hands dirty, or just prefer not to hack up your front yard. The next site that appears in the top results is Amazon.com.

Pretty much everybody knows how reliable a site Amazon is and I won’t go into that very deeply. Most of the products available in this store for fishing worms are very similar. Most of the results in the front have the brand Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm and are also sold under this name as the Amazon seller. The reviews are all very positive. For fishing worms, some listing will equal out to be around 15 cents a worm from this seller. That isn’t too bad when you think about it. It is a good price for worms in general, but it can still become quite expensive because it is a recurring expense especially if it is the only bait you rely on.

This brings me to the last option that Google gave us. Uncle Jims Worm Farm. It is number three. Also a great site also with great reviews. The problem is the price, yet again. The amount of money that minnows and worms cost today is just staggering. If you buy into all of it, you lose so much money. It really doesn’t have to be that way. Berkley Crappie Nibbles are so much cheaper, you don’t have to keep them alive, they are readily available, and they just catch fish better than any other bait I have used or tried out for Crappie.

Is It Exclusively For Crappie?

Certainly not. Nope. Nope, nope and nope. Although these baits are targeted and designed with the intention to catch Crappie and certainly will when dropped in front of them, these baits do not play favorites to Crappie at all. Other panfish species and small Channel Catfish love them. They also make great bait for Bluegill, Redear, Pumpkinseed, Green Sunfish, and even small Bullheads will take this bait quickly. It seems to be that many species of fish are fond of the formula that Powerbait has invented.

Especially if you are a person who loves catching everything that bites, these will do that for you. This bait can be used to tip the hook of your jigs and can even be fished on a bare hook under a bobber for any species of panfish. Catfish, in particular, seem to be fond of the scent that is present in this bait. It makes for a great hook bait as well as a secondary attractant. You can catch Bluegill and pretty much every other species of Sunfish there is. This is great because those are found almost everywhere and are used as a bait for catching many other predator species like bass and catfish. This product is a must-have for any angler who fishes freshwater!

Berkley Crappie Nibbles are THE Bait For Crappie

If you considered the best bait to catch Crappie in the world, it would likely be live minnows and a lot of them. Minnows and other small fish are the primary forage of most Crappie after all. Even though this may be the case, minnows are hard to keep and take care of and if you don’t do it just right, you end up with dead bait that will not entice any Crappie to come up and strike it. Minnows are a very difficult resource to rely on because you have to catch them, keep them alive, and you have to carry them around with you.

That isn’t to say though, that the Crappie Nibbles by Berkley don’t hold second place to this title for their ease of use, value for the price, and even overall Crappie catching effectiveness.  They will catch Crappie consistently along with many other species of fish, they glow in the dark, they are biodegradable, inexpensive and one jar will last forever or close to it.

You can hook the bait on a hook by itself or use it to tip a jig. Both methods will do wonders for your Crappie fishing success as well as for other panfish. You do not have to keep bait alive, it stores away very easily in a tackle box or bag, they glow in the dark, they come in different colors, and they catch all three species of Crappie just as well if not better than live bait. The best Crappie Nibbles reviews come from the best Crappie anglers. Many put their faith in Berkley. You should too.

How were your experiences using Crappie Nibbles from Berkley? Leave a comment below this post to let us know!