February is prime time to catch some of the Carolinas’ biggest crappie.
It is the lake that nobody has ever heard of. Well, not exactly.
If you’re from the southern piedmont, anywhere near Richmond or Anson counties, you probably know about Blewett Falls Lake, a 2,560-acre reservoir on the Pee Dee River between the town of Lilesville and the city of Rockingham.
Describing it as “off the beaten path” probably isn’t strong enough. It’s clearly the least-developed, least-traveled lake of the Yadkin-Pee Dee system. It’s impounded by the last dam on the Pee Dee before the big river dumps its water into Winyah Bay, then into the Atlantic Ocean near Georgetown, S.C.
But you can be from just about anywhere in North or South Carolina, and if you claim to be a crappie-fishing fanatic, you doubtless know about Blewett Falls.
Almost unknown beyond its immediate area a few years ago, it now has a reputation that approaches the Tar Heel state’s best slab factories. Not every crappie that comes aboard your boat will weigh 2 pounds, but there are enough that get as big as dinner plates that nobody is really surprised when one makes a mistake and mistakes a tiny plastic jig for a minnow.
“It’s a unique little place,” said pro crappie fisherman Bryant Parnell of Concord, who discovered Blewett Falls in 2002 when it was about the only lake on the big river system with enough water to float a boat. “It used to not get very much pressure at all, and it still doesn’t. But we started fishing it the year of the big drought when High Rock was about dry and when you couldn’t get a boat in Tuckertown, Badin or Tillery. But Blewett Falls was plumb full.
“I went down with Dale Lanning, a dear old friend who has passed away, and we’d go down there and fish because it was the only place you could put in. We were fishing in June, July and August — not exactly the best months of the year for crappie — and we’d catch 20 to 25 fish every day in the 1- to 2-pound range.”
It didn’t take long for word to get out once the Southern Crappie Association scheduled a couple of big tournaments at Blewett Falls, which is now a regular spot on the pro circuit that draws most of the best crappie fishermen from North and South Carolina, plus a lot from Georgia and Virginia.
The attention hasn’t hurt the lake too much. At least that’s what local expert Randy Jacobs of Rockingham said. One of the most accomplished crappie fishermen at the lake, Jacobs said most crappie anglers forget the lake even exists from the time the spring spawn ends until it begins 11 months later.
“A lot of people put their rods away after the spawning season, but you can catch ’em all year if you can stand heat and cold,” Jacobs said. “The only time the lake gets any pressure is in the spring.”
But Jacobs figures crappie have to eat year-round, even if they don’t gorge themselves as much as they do when the dogwoods bloom.
That’s what makes February an interesting month.
Jacobs works the upper half of the river and catches slabs in relatively shallow water — shallow for February, that is. And Parnell works the lower end, which really starts to turn around the third week of the month.
Jacobs said the fishing at his end of the lake starts to tail off near the first of March, while Parnell said it only gets better down close to the dam, a few miles north of the Rt. 74 bridge across the Pee Dee River west of Rockingham.
Who’s right? Both of them, of course, because Blewett Falls, which was impounded in 1912, is not only off the beaten path, it fishes like two lakes.
The lower end, from the dam about 5 miles upstream, is a typical low-land reservoir with a well-defined creek channel and a handful of feeder creeks. The upper end, from the “Grassy Islands” area upstream to the tailrace below Norwood Dam (which impounds Lake Tillery), is a shallow, rock-strewn river bed that appears ready to eat the lower units of outboard motors as quickly as its crappie will eat a minnow.
Parnell says February “is the most volatile month in a crappie’s life. He’s going from deep on the main lake to the mouth of a creek to stage up for the spawn. Late in the month, about the third week of the month, when it starts to warm up, they come up off the bottom and start getting ready to move back to spawn.”
So Parnell spends most of his time during February fishing the mouth of two feeder creeks at the lower end of the lake — Smith Creek and Buffalo Creek, which drain the Anson County (west) bank.
“As the days get longer, and it gets warmer, they move up out of the channel and migrate to the mouth of creeks,” Parnell said. “I’ll probably fish from the mouth of Smith Creek out to Big Island on the main channel. We caught a lot of good crappie there last year.”
Parnell is partial to slow-trolling tiny mini-jigs with multiple rods, the fave rage called “spider-webbing“ in crappie-fishing circles. He fishes anywhere from eight to 16 rods at a time, spreading them out bow and stern, port and starboard. He uses Slider jigs, favoring black/glow tail and junebug/chartreuse tail, because like most of the Yadkin-Pee Dee chain, Blewett Falls tends to stay a little stained year-round.
“A Slider is a 2-inch jig, and I’ll fish it on a 1/32-ounce jighead. I troll anywhere from 1/2 to 1 mile per hour,” he said. “The colder the day, the slower you go. How deep you fish depends on the day. By late February, you can catch ’em at most any depth, and some people will be catching the young males already in on the bank around brush.”
Parnell spreads out his rods, using 12-footers to keep some jigs close to the boat and others (as much as 16-feet long) to spread them farther away from his gunwales. Particular to ultralight Quantum spinning reels and B&M poles, he spools his rods with 8-pound-test Trilene monofilament.
One of his tricks is to fish two jigs and a minnow from one rod — the second jig being a hand-tied hair jig called a Catawba Fly.
“The way I like to fish a Catawba Fly is to run it on a double rig with a slider,” Parnell said. “I tie off a little loop about 2-inches long and put the slider on it, and I keep the tag end (of the line) about 14-inches down, and I’ll tie the Catawba Fly to the end and tip it with a live minnow. They’ll really hammer that little fly with the minnow.”
Parnell spends most of his time zig-zagging back and forth across the primary points at the mouths of Smith or Buffalo creeks, working out across the flats toward Big Island and back, paying attention to where crappie are concentrated because once they set up at the mouth of a creek, they’ll stay in the same area for weeks at a time until the spawning urge — and warming weather — moves them back in creeks and to the bank.
Parnell’s one worry is the water level. Progress Energy, which operates the hydroelectric plant at Blewett Falls Dam, often yo-yos the lake’s water level enough that launching a boat from the Anson County boat ramp can be a trying experience.
“If I was going to fish Blewett Falls for the first time, I’d treat it a little like (South Carolina’s) Santee Cooper,” he said. “You’d better know where you’re going or stick to the channel markers. I think that’s one thing that keeps a lot of people away.
“Blewett Falls is a little bit similar in size to Tuckertown, but it doesn’t have the fishing area that Tuckertown does because there’s so much shallow water. In fact, ‘Blewett’ is an Indian word that means ‘fish trap.’ The Indians used to build fish traps out of rocks up in the river and run the fish into them and trap them. They’re like inverted ‘V’s’, and there are still several of them up in the river.”
Ah, up the river. That’s where local expert Jacobs plies his trade, several miles away from Parnell and light year’s away in terms of technique. About the only thing that’s similar is both of them like to use artificial mini-jigs.
Jacobs catches fish shallow the entire month of February, then things taper off for him.
“Everybody talks about crappie going deep in the winter, but up in the river, you don’t have much deep water,” said Jacobs, who typically launches his boat at the public access area at Mountain Creek, then heads upstream and fishes from an area with a series of grassy islands to a long oxbow known as Smith Lake.
“There are some deep holes, but you don’t have to catch ‘em there,” he said. “There isn’t enough deep water up in the river to fit all the crappie.”
So Jacobs concentrates at brush piles in relatively shallow water — 9 to 10 feet. Some of them are natural obstructions that have washed into the river and gotten lodged at the bottom in rocks or stumps — and some of them Jacobs put in himself.
“There are deep places in the river, but 80 percent of the river isn’t deep, and all of the crappie don’t get to hide in ‘em,” he said. “I don’t vertical jig; I cast out and throw my jigs over brush piles and reel them back real, real slow.”
Jacobs said a lot of other anglers scoff at the Zebco 33 spincast reels he uses, but he said they have the slowest ratio of retrieve on the market — and slow is the ticket.
“I use a Kalin jig, a 2-inch-long jig, on a 1/16-ounce jighead, and I like to fish ‘acid rain’ (a color),” he said. “You cast it out, count it down and reel it back as slow as you can.
“Especially in the winter, a crappie don’t like it fast; the slower, the better. So many people think you can cast it out and bring it back right under the surface, but you won’t catch many doing that.”
Jacobs said , especially early in the afternoon, the water will have warmed enough that crappie will move up relatively shallow. He may have brush anywhere from 8- to 10-feet deep, but it will extend toward the surface, and crappie often hang out in the shallowest limbs.
“If I’m fishing brush in 9 or 10 feet of water, I’ll cast my jig out and count one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand, then start reeling,” he said. “If I count to four thousand and I hit brush, I back up a little to three thousand. But if you’re not hitting brush and getting hung up, you’re not crappie fishing.
“The way I fish is so simple, but you have to know where the brush is.”
Jacobs said navigation can be a little tricky if the water level is down. If the lake is 3 or 4 feet below full pool, it’s difficult to get a boat through the rocky river bottom in front of the Mountain Creek landing. Likewise, he said if you put in on the lower end, you have to stick to the river channel or you run into shallow stumps.
“When you get to the Grassy Islands, it turns into rocks,” he said. “If you run up from the dam, you run in the middle of the channel and watch the buoys to tell you where to go.”
The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission manages Blewett Falls with a 20-fish daily creel limit and 8-inch size minimum, but Jacobs takes it a step better. He doesn’t keep any crappie shorter than 9-inches long because he fillets all the crappie he keeps and doesn’t want to mess with smaller fish.
“There are plenty of 1-pound fish,” he said. “You can catch them with no trouble.
“There are plenty of 2-pound fish, but you don’t go out and catch ’em all like that. If you told me that out of 20 fish you caught, you had one 2-pound fish and two more around 1 3/4 pounds, I’d believe you.
“There are lot of nice crappie in Blewett Falls. To me, it holds a better class of fish than Tillery.”
Be the first to comment