A Royal ‘Flush’

The biggest stripers anywhere on the Catawba River chain are making a big splash at Lake Rhodhiss.

David Clubb and Joe Jobin love to hear a couple of distinct noises.

The first sounds a little like a toilet flushing; the second resembles a cinder block dropping from two or three stories into a swimming pool.

They love those noises because they usually mean they’re hooked up with a big Lake Rhodhiss striped bass.

The toilet flush is the noise a striper makes when it comes to the surface to kill a big gizzard shad. The cinder block noise is heard when that same big striper comes back to eat the shad it killed or wounded during the first pass. And there’s a visual treat, as well.

“It’s something to see that big boil of mud when one comes up and bites,” Jobin said.

Clubb, who lives in Mooresville, and Jobin, who is from Vale are two fishing guides who have heard those wonderful noises dozens of times. They regularly fish Lake Rhodhiss, a 3,060-acre reservoir on the Catawba River between Hickory and Morganton, and are satisfied not too many other fishermen have discovered what might be the best trophy striper lake in North Carolina.

In 2007, Clubb (704-202-4608) landed seven stripers that weighed at least 20 pounds, including two that broke the 30-pound mark. Jobin (704-240-0165) sent six to the taxidermist that weighed between 28 and 34 pounds.

Fish weighing 45 pounds have been documented from the narrow reservoir downstream from Lake James and upstream from Lake Hickory.

April is the beginning of one of the best stretches of fishing the whole year at Rhodhiss. When the water temperature creeps up to around the 60-degree mark, stripers start to roll out of the lower end of the lake and cruise up into the Catawba River, preparing for their spawning run.

The river, upstream from the Huffman Road bridge, is narrow enough that one fisherman, rigged with side-planer boards to get his baits away from his boat, can fish its entire width. Its banks are littered with laydown trees, the results of three hurricanes — Hugo in 1989, Ivan and Francis in 2002 — strong enough to reach North Carolina’s foothills.

The lake’s stripers use those trees as places where they can stage, protected from the current that sets up when water is released upstream from Lake James or downstream through Rhodhiss Dam.

“The action usually starts around the second week in April,” said Jobin, who runs X-treme Striper Fishing Guide Service. “The water temperature will fluctuate, but (stripers) will be up in the river until about June. They’ll stay until the water temperature gets to about 70, then they’ll drop back down into the lake.

“When they’re up in the river, they’re all energy.”

The action takes place at the extreme upper end of the lake.

Because the water coming from the depths of Lake James into the Catawba River is extremely cool, the entire lake also remains cooler during the year than downstream reservoirs. That lower-than-average water temperature eliminates a lot of the summertime stress stripers often suffer. Without summer’s heat-induced stress, rockfish will eat 12 months of the year and may grown to prodigious sizes.

With so many lakes downstream with decent-to-good striper fisheries, anglers haven’t been willing to tow their boats the extra 30 minutes or so to fish Rhodhiss. There’s also the shallowness of the river (and hull-eating rocks), which is enough to scare away fainthearted striper chasers.

However, the anglers who make the trip have a good chance to hook up with some awe-inspiring linesiders. Rhodhiss isn’t a lake where catching small fish is normal. Jobin said he’s gone entire spring seasons without catching a fish that weighed less than eight pounds, and Clubb said that fishermen can expect most of the fish they catch to weigh between 10 and 15 pounds.

“You won’t catch the number of fish you will at some other lakes, but a good day at Rhodhiss might be six fish between 10 and 35 pounds,” he said. “My biggest is a 32 (pounder). And you aren’t going to catch any 6-pound fish. They’ll be 10 or better, with a lot of 15s.”

Techniques and tactics are fairly simple. Hook up a big gizzard shad, get to the John’s River, go upstream and find a likely looking place for a drift, and ease your way back downstream.

“Typically when you drift, you go about 8/10ths of a mile per hour with the current,” Jobin said. “You can go up to 1½ miles per hour to keep your planer boards out.

“If they’re running a lot of water, creating a lot of current, the stripers will move out in the middle of the river. They’ll hold in holes in the middle of the channel. Nine times out of 10, they’ll be at the deep sides of the holes. It’s an ambush point. (Stripers) will hit (baits or lures) with a vengeance in the river.”

If the current isn’t too strong, Jobin will ease down the bank, sometimes fishing live baits behind planer boards, but just as often, flipping them close to tree laps and holes along the bank while using spinning tackle.

“In the spring, it doesn’t matter whether you fish mornings or afternoons,” Jobin said. “You hook a shad through the nose with a weedless hook and pull them along the bank, over the logs. You can pitch them to the bank and just float along. You can put them under a float.

“You find those deep holes where they’ve dredged sand, get upstream of them and float a bait down into the hole.”

Jobin typically uses15-pound Berkley Big Game monofilament line on his reel, with a 3- to 4-foot leader of 17-pound-test Berkley Vanish fluorocarbon. When he drifts shad with planer boards, he likes to keep the baits 80 to 100 feet behind the boards.

“The river is so narrow and shallow, that if you put the bait back that far, it looks like a vulnerable little bait out by itself,” he said. “The lower the amount of water they’re running, the closer (stripers) get to the structure along the banks.

“We’ll pull right up and work those trees. When you hook one, most of them will run back to the middle of the river.”

That’s the one area where Jobin and Clubb go in different directions. Clubb puts his baits as close to the bank as possible all the time, reeling them in and letting line out to keep them from tangling in the trees laps. That’s where almost all of his bites have originated.

“Those big stripers will get in the treetops and ambush the baits that come by,” he said. “You’re working in and out of the trees, drifting downstream. You can keep your boat in the middle of the river and cover both baits. You work with planer boards and keep your baits out of the trees.

“I keep my bait about 10 feet behind the planer board to keep it out of the trees. If you give the bait any more line than that, they’re going to go hunt up a tree. I don’t think the planer board bothers the stripers in the spring when they’re so aggressive.”

However, the shoreline trees make it more difficult to get a hooked striper to the boat.

Clubb said stripers often wind up in a treetop during the course of a fight, and that spells doom for the angler.

“Just because you hook one doesn’t mean you’ll get him to the boat,” he said. “You lose a lot in the trees. Hey, you’re fishing in a jungle.”

Clubb fishes a 7-foot, medium-heavy Shimano rod and Shimano Calcutta baitcasting reel spooled with 80-pound Power Pro braid. He uses a Waterbugz planer board, doesn’t put split shots on the line and likes to use 7/0 Gamakatsu Octopus hooks.

That big a hook might slow down a lot of baitfish, but not the big gizzard shad Clubb fishes at Rhodhiss. A hook that large might slow down a lot of baitfish but not the big gizzard shad Clubb fishes at Rhodhiss.

“In the spring, stripers will eat big baits,” he said. “The biggest gizzard shad you’ve got will be the first one hit.

“You can find bait at the backs of most of the coves, and if you get 15 big baits, you’re ready to go. If you get seven or eight bites in a half-day, you’re happy.

“But I have had three blowups in my spread at the same time. You don’t know which one to reel in first.”

Clubb is used to using live rainbow trout for bait when fishing for stripers at Lake Norman during winter. He’s looking at fishing bigger trout at Lake Rhodhiss this spring because he believes stripers will really blast them.

In addition, trout are occasionally found at the extreme upper end of the river because they’re stocked in a tributary stream, Muddy Creek, that runs into the river a few miles downstream from Lake James. The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission stocks trout and manages the area from Muddy Creek downstream to Rhodhiss Dam.

“My plan is to pull some big trout this spring and see what happens,” said Clubb, who had the accidental opportunity to put four muskellunge in his boat one summer while pulling live shad for stripers at Rhodhiss.

Jobin pretty much stops fishing at the NC 18 bridge, while Clubb has been farther upstream. Clubb said fishing upstream in the John’s River can be good. There’s enough water, normally, to fish upstream as far as the public boat ramp, drifting shad downstream behind planer boards.

Besides the big stripers, there’s the matter of the scenery. Rhodhiss hasn’t been developed along its shoreline similar to the rest of the Catawba River reservoirs. Upriver, with a few exceptions, anglers will find themselves in a wilderness.

“Rhodhiss is a beautiful, undeveloped fishery,” Clubb said.