Blackwater Slabs

The rivers that feed Albemarle Sound provide plenty of crappie action this month.

Some days it’s hard to separate the biologist from the fisherman. With the more temperate days of October at hand, Kevin Dockendorf was playing fisherman.

Most of the time, Dockendorf is the coastal research coordinator for the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission, but on a day off, he launched his boat into the Pasquotank River from the Waterfront Park in Elizabeth City.

A few minutes later, intently working one of the pilings beneath the Riverside Avenue Bridge, he felt a slight tap on the line, indicating that something was interested in his crappie jig.

“It’s a good start,” he said, flipping an 11-inch black crappie into the boat.

It was obvious how crappie have earned the nickname “speckled perch” over the years; it bore dark splotches of emerald green against a body of tarnished silver and an overall golden hue from a lifetime in the tannic black waters of the Pasquotank.

After boating another half-dozen fish from the bridge, Dockendorf motored to a man-made canal with modern, residential piers and boat docks, where he continued to add to the fish count in the livewell. Only a couple of fish away from having a limit for himself and a guess, Dockendorf steered north of the Norfolk Southern railroad trestle toward backwater areas in the lee of Goat Island.

“When most anglers talk about blackwater fishing for speckled perch, this is what they have in mind,” Dockendorf said, gesturing to tangled water oaks and cypress trees. “Actually, this is just one of many areas on these coastal rivers where you can find crappie.”

The Albemarle Sound region has a number of major coastal rivers that provide plenty of action for crappie anglers. Clockwise, they are the North, Pasquotank, Perquimans, Chowan, Cashie, Roanoke and Scuppernong, all of which dump into the sound en route to the Atlantic Ocean. At some point in this journey, each waterway changes from freshwater to brackish and eventually into salt. Accordingly, the amount of freshwater in the rivers has a great bearing on where crappie will be found.

“In general, crappie will move upstream to avoid higher levels of salinity,” Dockendorf said, temporarily stepping into biologist mode. “This tends to congregate these fish into certain areas, which can be good for the angler who locates them. Water qualities also include the amount of dissolved oxygen that is available this time of year. Some of the swamp drainages upstream will sometimes put water with lower dissolved-oxygen levels into the river. Water quality can be tough on crappie when the swamps are dumping water, especially during the late summer and into September. By October, however, there’s usually better water quality, and if there’s been enough rainfall, the incoming freshwater will scatter the fish out more.”

A typical fall pattern for crappie across the board is to follow baitfish migrations. The coastal rivers are teeming with forage and provide fertile growing grounds for all species of fish. Blackwater crappie have a choice of menhaden, river herring, gizzard shad and young of the year of many other species.

“Most of the forage tends to be pretty good-sized in the rivers,” said Dockendorf. “That’s one of the keys to our getting good growth rates. Juvenile crappie feed on invertebrates such as insects and small shrimp up until they are five or six inches in size. After that, they convert over to fish for food, and that’s when their growth rates sky rocket.

“A 3- to 4-inch menhaden is the primary food source for adult crappie, but the crappie have to be in the 9- to 13-inch range to eat a food that size. Another factor is that these fisheries are 100-percent black crappie. In my eight years with the (Commission), I have never seen a white crappie sampled in this area. Black crappie — specks — have a higher tolerance for salty water, but they don’t seem to live as long as the whites. The saying goes “Grow Fast, Die Young” when you’re talking about specks.”

Dockendorf’s favorite method of fishing is to probe structure with artificials.

“Personally, I prefer the single-pole approach to crappie fishing,” he said. “I use more artificial baits, and I like to cast to or vertically jig visible structure like boat docks or bridge pilings. In order to do this, you need to spend a lot of time working an area to locate which docks and bridges hold fish. In this clear — although tannic — water, especially during the fall, you won’t catch fish unless you’re fishing around structure. It’s very rare to find crappie away from structure unless they are suspending over the top of it.

“I think this is one of the reasons that so many other crappie anglers who fish these rivers rely on spider-rig tactics, so they can cover a lot of ground and fish that underwater structure that’s on the bottom of these rivers.”

Jeffrey Wynn of Bear Grass is a fan of the multiple-rod approach. His favorite perch-jerking grounds is the lower Roanoke River between Jamesville and Plymouth. Specifically, he targets smaller tributaries that feed into the Roanoke.

“We do better fishing the creeks off the river rather than the river itself,” he said. “Especially if the river is low, it will pull the minnows out of the swamps, and they’ll be out in the creeks where the specks are. There’s a lot of structure — stumps, downed trees, and snags — that pile up on the bottom around the mouths of the creeks. The normal water depths will be in the 12- to 18-foot range. I try to motor upcurrent or upwind of these locations, put out six to eight poles and drift along with the current.”

Wynn describes his spider-rigging tactic as drifting, but he points out that he’ll often use the trolling motor on his 18-foot War Eagle boat to bump along or to stay focused on the drop-offs at the edge of the creek channel. With each rod set at a different depth and secured in a rod holder, he then goes with the flow along the edge of the channel. He starts his baits at four to six feet and staggers the depths down to around 12 feet. Because of the abundance of potential hang-ups, he only uses one hook per pole.

“These crappie are feeding on what we call a ‘pop-gut minnow.’ It’s not a shad, but more like a creek minnow with silver sides. That’s why most of the time I’m using minnows that you buy at a bait shop, because they match what the specks are eating. On occasion, I’ll use a Bass Pro Shops umbrella tube jig. If you’re using jigs, it’s best to try to match the jig color with the water color and go darker on dark days and lighter if the sun is out and the water looks brighter.”