It’s crappie season. Find out why this expert isn’t going anywhere near the bank to get his limit of slabs.
The month of April ushers in the spring spawn for crappie. The dogwoods are blooming, and all you have to do is grab a bucket of minnows and suspend them under a cork around just about any decent looking piece of woody cover along the bank. It’s a time when everyone is an expert.Then there’s Ed Duke.
He doesn’t go anywhere near the shoreline. While other anglers are working every piece of visible cover along the bank, Duke is still out in the middle of the creek trolling. While other anglers are busily working a single rod in and around bushes and overhanging trees in knee-deep water, Ed is quietly slipping along. Fishing line from a dozen rods, perched in rod holders around his boat, glistens in the early morning sun and cuts into his wake as he glides through the water. In crappie circles, Duke is what’s known as a “long liner.”
“April is the peak of the spawn on just about all of the piedmont lakes in North Carolina” said Duke, who hails from Concord and has fished just about every lake in the southeast that’s known to hold crappie. “Even when crappie are in the shallowest areas they are all year, I find that I can consistently catch more, and more important, larger crappie by trolling than I could with any other method.
“I’ll troll shallow out in the middle of a spawning flat,” he said, “I prefer deeper creeks, because my experience has shown me that bigger crappie, fish in the 2-pound-plus range, will lay eggs in as deep as 10 feet of water. I like to target those fish that never make it up to the real shallow waters along the shoreline.”
The former executive director of the Southern Crappie Association, Duke said that the norm on most Piedmont lakes is to find water between 55 and 62 degrees. That’s particularly true on two or three sleeper lakes on the Yadkin/Pee Dee chain that don’t get the pressure of higher-profile crappie fisheries like High Rock or Jordan. But because several of the Yadkin/Pee Dee system lakes have both white and black crappie, Duke holds that water temperatures near the 60-degree mark will put white crappie in a prespawn pattern, while black crappie will be spawning.
“Beginning in February, crappie will begin a very predictable migrational pattern that leads them from the mouths of major tributaries back to the spawning flats in April,” Duke said. “After both species have completed their spawning in May, the trend reverses and the fish go back the way they came.
“For this entire time period between February and May, you can find crappie somewhere along these migrational routes in water anywhere from two to 12 feet deep. The difference is determining what depth they’re in.”
In a nutshell, Duke’s long-lining technique involves using multiple rods: six off the bow of his Ranger 620VS Fisherman and six more rods off the stern. They are strategically placed so that the lines from each rod — 100 feet back is normal for Duke — do not cross or tangle while trolled at a snail’s pace of less than one mile per hour.
With crappie at the shallowest end of this sliding scale, Duke’s long-line trolling tactics work just fine. He admits that trolling across a shallow flat — even in water that’s 10 feet deep — will cause crappie to scatter from the shadow cast by the boat. It’s for that reason Duke uses rods ranging from 12 to 16 feet long on the bow. As the boat spooks fish, their flight paths put them directly in line with his front-row baits. In addition, after the boat passes and fish begin back-filling in his wake, the second row of baits, typically manned by his wife and fishing partner, Trudy, put another wave of offerings in their path.
“We use 1/32nd-ounce jigs on all our rods this time of year,” Duke said. “The jigs are outfitted with either curlytail grubs or Charlie Brewer paddletails that create a lot of action. The key to getting bites is getting familiar with which speeds, combined with certain jig weights, put the baits at the depth you want to fish.”
As an example, Duke said he has found that 1/32nd-ounce jigs trolled at .7 mph with 100 feet of line out will run around five feet deep. Since crappie feed up and may suspend in deeper water at their target spawning depths, five feet is a good place to be in April.
Speaking of good places to be — Duke has several lakes he particularly likes to fish in April.
Tuckertown Lake
Duke said that Tuckertown is more stained than some lakes upstream on the Yadkin chain; he concentrates most of his fishing in the Ryles Creek area.
“I’ll access Ryles from the ramp at Flat Creek, which can also be a good area to troll,” Duke said. “Both of those creeks are above the Stokes Ferry Bridge crossing and tend to be shallow and dingy. Shallow and dingy is a great combination for long-lining.”
Brian McRae, a biologist who oversees reservoir fishing in the Piedmont for the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission, said that Tuckertown should see an upswing in its crappie growth since the lake has returned to full pond from recent droughts in 2005 and 2007. That will allow crappie to reach their normal shoreline spawning grounds, he said.
“Tuckertown has a good density of crappie and a good mix, maybe 50-50 black and white crappie, with maybe just a shade toward black crappie as far as numbers go,” McRae said. “The 8-inch minimum size limit and 20-fish creel limit that was instituted in 2006 will also serve to help this fishery grow bigger fish in the near future.”
Lake Tillery
Getting further back into creek arms is in order for crappie fishing on Lake Tillery, one of Duke’s favorite Yadkin reservoirs. The water tends to be clearer, and he favors Jacobs and Cedar Creeks because they offer the best combination of conditions.
“Jacobs usually has some color to it, and it also has a large spawning flat in the back end,” he said. “Cedar Creek is pretty similar too. The creek fingers off in three different directions toward the back, and there’s a great spawning flat just before you get to the steel bridge.”
McRae said that Tillery may just be the Yadkin system’s most-overlooked reservoir when it comes to crappie.
“If there is a sleeper crappie lake on the Yadkin chain, it’s Tillery,” said McRae, who indicated that Tillery ranks high on his list of trophy lakes in the region due to the size of its crappie. His recent trap-net surveys showed 95 percent of the fishery, which is predominantly black crappie, was more than nine inches long, and a whopping 75 percent were 10 inches long or better.
“Although crappie populations tend to be cyclical, the fishery at Tillery is definitely on the rise. Not only are the lengths good but these are fat fish with great body weights,” McRae said.
A favorite boating access are on Tillery is at Swift Island, located at the Hwy 24/27 bridge between Buzzard Mountain and Stony Mountain.
Blewett Falls Lake
“We call it bowl fishing on Blewett because the lake is round and shallow and fish spawn all over,” Duke said. “It’s an ideal crappie-fishing lake because it has color from one end to the other, some overlooked flats on either side of the Pee Dee channel, and a lot of submerged standing timber.”
McRae said that Blewett Falls continues to see very little fishing pressure and has remained pretty consistent over the years. The 2,560-acre lake, which covers the former waterfalls for which it is named, has a population primarily made up of black crappie.
“Our surveys showed that 70 percent of the fish sampled are over the 8-inch limit; that’s a healthy fishery,” he said.
Duke suggests starting out at either Smith Creek or Buffalo Creek and trolling from the deeper sides where the water may be 20 feet and work back toward the 5-foot spawning flats in the back. His favorite ramp is the Pee Dee Access Ramp west of Rockingham.
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