Secret Water

Piedmont anglers mostly have forgotten a wide stretch of the Cape Fear called Buckhorn, but a local bass pro says it’s a lunker largemouth haven.

When Jeffrey Thomas was growing up in the Lee County town of Broadway, there was only one place to go fishing — at the outskirts of town, below the junction of the Deep and Haw Rivers, an old, abandoned dam impounded a section of the Cape Fear River. “I used to fish for carp off the bank with my grandfather, and when my uncle got out of the service and bought a boat, this is where we fished,” Thomas said, pointing to a section of water near the Rt. 42 (or Avents Ferry Bridge). “This used to be the only place to go before Harris and Jordan.”

Ah, before Harris and Jordan.

For a lot of bass fishermen in the Raleigh-Durham area, there never has been a time when the two big reservoirs weren’t there to fish. But Thomas and many other fishermen who are on the graying side of 40, Shearon Harris and Jordan lakes weren’t always there.

Before the two reservoirs were impounded in the 1980s, local anglers had few places to go, but one of them was that part of the Cape Fear that Thomas knows as the “Buckhorn reservoir” or “Buckhorn pool” — just a wide spot in the river, about 10 miles long, full of bass, bream and catfish.

Once anglers discovered Jordan and Harris, nearly everyone forgot about Buckhorn, which is named after the quarter-mile-wide dam that’s 2 miles downstream from the Rt. 42 Bridge.

“Everybody abandoned it; nobody came, not even the water skiers,” said Thomas, who admitted even he turned most of his attention to the bigger lakes.

But a few years ago, Thomas, a professional bass fisherman and owner of Carolina Outdoors Guide Service, went back to his old stomping grounds. It wasn’t quite what he remembered. Oh, the bream and catfish were still drawing the attention of fishermen. But as far as bass fishing was concerned, Buckhorn just wasn’t the same.

It was better.

“It’s a hidden jewel as far as bass are concerned,” said Thomas (919-770-4654). “The only access area is the old ramp at Rt. 42, and that’s where I go when I want to have fun fishing.”

Thomas readily admits that he didn’t rediscover Buckhorn all by himself. He started hearing about more and more bass-fishing clubs having little weekly tournaments on the river pool, tournaments in the late spring and summer that were producing some fairly impressive catches. And many of the fishermen were using one of his favorite lures – buzzbaits.

“What happened was, the (N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission) put the 16-inch size minimum on Jordan Lake, then it put the (16- to 20-inch) slot limit on Harris Lake, and Buckhorn became the place to go for guys who wanted to be able to weigh in (14-inch) fish in a tournament,” Thomas said. “They didn’t like the 16 at Jordan or the slot at Harris. Now, it’s getting a lot more pressure than it did before.”

And surely a lot more fishermen are leaving happy, Thomas said.

“A (five-fish) 15-pound limit in the spring is pretty common, and the biggest I can remember hearing about is 19,” Thomas said. “But it’s more about numbers of fish. The bass population has exploded at the lake. There are a lot of 2-pound fish, a lot of 13- and 14-inch fish, but you’ll see quite a few 4-pounders. We had an 8- and a 9-pounder caught last May — both on buzzbaits — so they’re there.

“You can come out just before dark in the summer and see baitfish all over the surface of the river. And you can come out like I did when I was little and go down the bank with a Roostertail or a Beetle Spin and catch fish.”

But Thomas is serious when he said one of Buckhorn’s big draws for him is it has developed into a great buzzbait fishery from the time the spawn ends in late April through the summer.

“A nice brown stain is normal in the spring, and there’s usually enough current that they can’t see a buzzbait real good,” Thomas said. “They’re aggressive, and it’s easy to fish around logs and laydowns. There will be a lot of (water) flow, and like any river, it’s real dependent on water flow. But I wouldn’t throw anything but a buzzbait, even if there isn’t a cloud in the sky.”

One thing fishermen must understand about Buckhorn is it isn’t really a traditional “reservoir” — even if it is impounded by a dam.

Scott Van Horn, formerly the reservoir coordinator for the commission, was involved sampling the pool for hybrid bass and stripers, and he describes Buckhorn as “an impounded channel.

“The water doesn’t get up and out into the flood plane,” he said. “All the dam does is raise the water level within the river channel. It’s exactly like fishing a river — like many of the locks and dams do on the lower Cape Fear.”

Buckhorn has three specific sections — the main stem of the Cape Fear, the Deep River arm and the Haw River arm. Buckhorn Dam is about 2 miles south of the Rt. 42 bridge. It’s a run of about 4 or 5 miles from the dam to the junction of the two smaller rivers. From the split, it’s another 4 or 5 miles up the Haw to the tailrace below Jordan Dam. Up the Deep River, it’s a run of only 2 or 3 miles before one’s path is blocked by Lockville Dam, an old CP&L dam much like Buckhorn.

“I think the Deep River is better,” Thomas said. “It generally has more color, whereas the Haw will have more flow. I like the Deep because if it gets red (muddy) for a day, it doesn’t take long to clear up and be fishable, but if the Haw gets to flooding and muddies up the river, then Jordan upstream will get muddy and the Haw will stay red for a while — where the Deep will be clear.

“The Deep has got more shallow banks compared to the Haw — more flats and shallows. It’s like getting in the back of a creek.

“The flow makes a lot of difference. The river stays about the same temperature up and down, but the Haw may stay a little cooler, with the water coming off the bottom of Jordan. Or, it may be a little warmer if Jordan is muddy.”

Thomas really doesn’t start fishing Buckhorn until May, after the spawn, when most fish have recovered. He starts near the mouths of some of the bigger creeks that feed into the river.

“You’ll have fish staging at any little inlet in the river where they can spawn, and you’ll have fish staging at the mouths of these places,” Thomas. “Most of the time, they can get out of the current.

“I think they spawn later in the year on the river, and most of the fish are postspawn fish in May. That’s why fishing a buzzbait is so good. They’re guarding fry, ready to eat. The spawn will fall from the full moon in April to the full moon in May.”

The most popular creek is Bush Creek, which enters Buckhorn at the Lee County (south) bank, just upstream from Buckhorn Dam. It’s filled with aquatic grass and runs a mile or so off the river.

“There are more big fish caught out of that creek than anywhere else on the lake. It’s one of the main spawning creeks,” Thomas said.

Yarborough’s Creek enters the river just upstream from the Rt. 42 Bridge at the Lee County side of the lake, near the Sanford water-treatment plant. At the back of the creek is a backwater pond that covers several acres.

Two miles upstream from the Rt. 42 Bridge, Goat Island divides the river channel roughly in half, with Lick Creek entering on the left.

CP&L still has a hydroelectric plant at Buckhorn’s banks, north of the Rt. 42 Bridge at the Chatham County side of the lake. There is a discharge, but the water is cooled somewhat before it is returned to the lake, said biologist John Crutchfield with CP&L. It is piped from the lake well downstream, dumping into a backwater slough just upstream from the dam.

“The hot hole used to be the most popular place to get into, but now the canal is blocked off,” Thomas said.

Thomas said Buckhorn can comfortably fish about 30 boats without fishermen crawling all over each other. He likes to fish certain stretches of bank to take advantage of the primary cover — laydowns — but there is plenty of rip-rapped banks and shallow logs, and bridge pilings are numerous. From Buckhorn Dam upstream to Jordan and Lockville dams, a handful of different bridges cross the river — Rt. 42, the Seaforth railroad bridge, then the twin spans of the old U.S. Rt. 1 and new U.S. Rt. 1 bridges. Those four bridges cross the Haw and Deep rivers.

“I fish a buzzbait parallel to the trunks of the laydowns, and I like to fish all around the mouth of the creeks and shallow areas like the flats in Bush Creek,” Thomas said. “You get a lot of places around the mouth of creeks that are silted in. And (hurricanes) Fran and Dennis made it so you can’t go very far back in a lot of the creeks, so you want to concentrate at the mouths of the creeks anyway.”

Thomas fishes a Lunker Lure buzzbait, normally 3/8- to ½-ounce, with silver, gold or white blades and a trailer hook. He uses 17-pound Magna Flex line, and he fishes buzzbaits with a a 6-1/2-foot medium-heavy Skeet’s Custom Rod.

“You can’t work a buzzbait too fast for ’em,” he said. “Either they’ve already spawned and are back feeding again, or they’ve spawned and they’re guarding fry. If the water’s clear, I’ll go to a Berkley Power Floater (floating worm) on a 4/0 hook — sometimes it’s clear enough that you have to do that.

“I always keep a Berkley Power Jig with a Power Craw trailer tied onto a 7 1/2-foot Skeet’s Signature Series flipping stick for fishing around bridge pilings and shallow logs. When I do that, I’ll go to 20-pound Magna Flex.”

The WRC’s Van Horn said there never have been any extensive studies done with Buckhorn’s bass. Early on, the WRC was concerned about hybrids and stripers moving up and down the Cape Fear, keeping hybrids from filtering down through Jordan Dam and moving downstream.

Crutchfield said CP&L’s sampling has been far from extensive. Most electro-shocking the company has done has been from the Rt. 42 bridge downstream to Buckhorn Dam.

“We’ve done some sampling, but nothing extensive,” he said. “We usually go in one or two times in the fall.

“It’s a decent fishery. You’ll find some good largemouth bass fishing — a lot of fish in the 1- to 2-pound range, and we’ve seen a good number of fish up to 4 pounds. We’ve got a lot of fish sampling (Bush Creek) and seen some nice fish up to 4 pounds in there.

“There are crappie — both blacks and whites — and flathead catfish and channel catfish. What we have seen a lot of is forage fish — threadfin and gizzard shad. They’re pretty plentiful, and there’s a lot of good habitat. There’s a lot of woody debris in the water, and I’d say that produces a lot of good cover for the fish.”