Sibling Slab Rivalry

Although Jordan Lake has held the big-crappie crown among Triangle lakes for years, Fall of the Neuse has caught its neighbor.

Falls of the Neuse Lake and Jordan Lake have grown up together — an hour’s drive apart on either side of the Raleigh-Durham area — since they were impounded more than 20 years ago. The bass fishing at both lakes developed along parallel tracks, one moving ahead of the other for a year or two, the other surging back, but both wound up among the top lakes in North Carolina for lunker largemouths.

But there’s never been a question about which lake produced the best crappie — at least not until now. From the time fishermen started hauling out coolers of big slabs from Jordan, that lake’s always been rated No. 1. Fishermen routinely drive from more than 100 miles away to angle for big Jordan crappie.

Biologists never had a clear understanding why crappie fishing didn’t take off right away at Falls of the Neuse. For several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, experts thought the population might be stunted — oodles of fish but most of them undersized.

So if a great crappie fishery has developed over the past 10 years, it’s largely grown up out of the limelight, away from the hordes of crappie “experts” who have been calling for size minimums and creel limits to protect the fantastic resource that is Jordan’s crappie fishery as that lake has matured and changed.

So what about Falls of Neuse? Apparently, it’s now “Jordan Junior” — a reservoir that takes a backseat, slab-wise, to no other lake in North Carolina, not even its kissing cousin to the southwest.

Two of the better crappie fishermen around, Rod King of Durham and Chris Coleman of Clarksville, Va., believe Falls of Neuse is second to none when it comes to producing big, thick crappie.

“On the average, Falls has some big crappie; it hangs right there with Jordan,” said King, a veteran fishermen who makes big waves in crappie tournaments around the Raleigh-Durham area. “There are a lot of 1 1/4-pound to 1 1/2-pound crappie for knowledgeable fishermen, and ¾- to 1-pound crappie are common.”

Coleman and his partner, Steve Tollerson, operate W&W Outdoor Adventures, guiding for crappie and big catfish at Buggs Island (Kerr) Lake, Lake Gaston and Falls of Neuse Lake.

“Falls is an excellent crappie fishery,” said Coleman (434-374-4011). “If I had my druthers, I’d fish Falls ever time I put my boat in the water — but it’s an hour’s drive from home versus 10 minutes (to Kerr).

“But I’ll tell you one thing. At Kerr, if you catch 100 (crappie), you’ll have 25 over a pound. At Falls, if you catch 100 fish, 50 to 55 of them will weigh a pound or better.”

So two really proficient crappie fishermen are carrying on a love affair with 12,410-acre Falls of Neuse — apparently with good reason. How does that affect the average fishermen with a small boat, a handful of crappie rods, a box full of jigs and tiny plastic baits and a bucket full of minnows?

During May the things that King and Coleman do to catch crappie — a great majority of which are postspawn but not all the way out to their summer haunts — can help weekend fishermen increase their success almost immediately.

And strangely enough, their approaches to fishing Falls of Neuse in May are very different, proving there’s always more than one way to skin a catfish — er, fillet a crappie.

Coleman spends time covering a lot of water, watching his depth-finder to figure out the depth crappie prefer particular days. During the past, King determined Falls of Neuse crappie suspend several feet below the surface at various depths as they head to deeper water as summertime approaches.

“Most of the time in May, what we do is fish Ledge Creek,” Coleman said. “It’s pretty centrally located, and we can put in, cruise around and see what we can find on the depth-finder.

“In May the fish will be up in the creeks, on their way back out after the spawn. In early May, you’ll probably still catch some fish with eggs, so you can catch them coming and going.

“Typically, what we’ll do is get an idea what depth the fish are using, and we’ll target depths where we’re marking the most fish, then go from two feet above to 2-feet below and everything in between with baits.”

Coleman fishes with Buck’s Crappie Poles, lightweight composite 12-foot rods with ultralight spinning reels spooled with 4-pound test mono. He’ll fish 16 rods at a time, with baits and lures covering all of the depths he wants to check.

“We fish 1/8-ounce jigheads in a variety of colors: yellow, black, pink and white,” Coleman said. “And we put little mini-tube skirts on the jigs, starting with a variety of colors depending on the water clarity. We may use eight to 10 colors, and a lot of the time, we’ll tip our jigs with minnows.

“At that time of year, you can move along at a pretty good clip on your trolling motor, so we cover water. We concentrate on structure: creek channels, dropoffs, road beds, humps, ledges, bottom contours.

“It’s not uncommon, early and late in the day, to go way back in the creek and catch fish. That can make it difficult to land one, because you have a 2-pound crappie on, 12 feet from the boat, with only 3 feet of line out. We’ve caught fish in as shallow as 3 feet of water, but we feel like the crappie will be moving up and down the creek channel as they go in and out.”

Trolling with multiple rods is most effective at the beginning and end of the day, Coleman said. Often at mid-day, fish move out into deeper water to get protection from sunlight. That’s when he finds a promising area, a place he expects to hold fish, and still-fishes.

“We’ll anchor up over the creek channel, find a turn or a steep place — even if it’s as little as just a foot or two — and drop out baits down to the bottom,” Coleman said.

“Normally, we concentrate on 10- to 14-feet deep. Big white crappie will feed up from the bottom, so we’ll have a couple of baits on the bottom, a couple one turn of the reel off the bottom, then we’ll have baits two turns, three, four or five off the bottom.

“Big white crappie like to start at the bottom and feed up, and with the boat traffic you sometimes get, you’ll get some natural jigging action.”

King said May “can be a fantastic month” — even though the spawn largely will have ended — because crappie at Falls of the Neuse seem none too excited about the idea of moving out to the deeper, cooler areas of the lake where they’ll set up shop for the summer. Sometimes, he said, they’ll linger a few feet below the surface into June.

“The fish have pretty much all spawned, but when they come off the bank, they don’t just run out there and go 20-feet deep,” King said. “They’ll come out and stage in open water 2- or 3-feet deep, and you can catch ’em on points or flats. How long they stay depends on the water clarity and how fast (the weather) heats up.

“They’ll come off the bank after they spawn, and they’ll slowly meander out, ganging up on points, at the same depth, and then they’ll slowly slide down into deeper water.

“At Kerr Lake in May, crappie will come off the banks and get out under boat docks. At Falls, there are no boat docks, so they’ll get out over the deeper water or on deep banks.

“I’ve got a couple of points I fish in different creeks on Falls that are usually real good in May — and on into June,” King said. “They’ve got deep water — 10 to 12 feet — around them, and having that deep water close by will help hold the crappie there.

“Where they’re heading is to the main river channel, out there where there’s 25 or 35 feet of water. In the summer, they’ll suspend 10- or 12-feet deep over the channel; sometimes, they’ll get right up against stumps. But they’ll work there way out there real slow.”

The speed with which slabs leave the shallows will be affected a lot by how fast the water warms and by whether or not the water stays stained well into late spring.

“If the water is dingy, they’ll stay cool, and they’ll stay up for a longer time,” King said. “They’ll slowly go back and meet up on those points. And they’ll use road beds — about every creek on the lake has one.”

King has two basic strategies for catching big slabs — one that works earlier in the month and one that works better after fish have been off the bank a while. Both approaches involve fishing eight rods at the back of the boat off rod-holders spaced along the transom, four on each side. He staggers the length of the rods, putting the shortest closer to the motor, and fishes heavier jigheads on those short rods — and lighter jigs on the rods, which get progressively longer the closer they get to the gunwales.

“That way, when you make a turn, your jigs that are closer to the motor, they’ll stay deeper, and the ones that are farther out will get shallower so you don’t get tangled up,” King said.

“When they’re just coming off and meandering out, trolling real fast is the best way to catch ’em. You put your trolling motor on 4 (high speed), put eight rods out, and you can cover a whole lot of water. I’ll fish different pole lengths and jig weights, just cruising over points because the fish will be more scattered then. They’re coming off the bank at different times and places.”

When he “fast trolls,” King uses chartreuse jig heads from 1/8th to 1/64 ounce, typically threading on Bass Pro Shops “Triple Ripple” curly-tail grubs in various colors. He will also “slow troll” with the same spread of eight rods, setting his trolling motor on a much slower speed and fishing mostly mini-jigs tipped with live minnows.

“I don’t think big crappie like to chase that much, so I like to slow troll — put my trolling motor on 1 (low) and go real slow, or if it’s windy, just let the wind push me along,” King said. “I don’t use grubs when I’m slow-trolling; I just tip my jigs with live minnows.

“But when I fast troll, from my experience when the water is cooler, they don’t want a curlytail — they want something straight like a tube. When the water warms up, and the fish like more action, they’ll roll up and grab a curlytail. That can be deadly after the spawn until they go all the way back out.”

As far as grub colors, King likes chartreuse, except when the water is particularly clear — of if he catches a cloudy day. Then he’ll use black/blue or Junebug.

“Early in the spring, they really like a pink jighead, but after the spawn, chartreuse is best,” he said.

King said Falls of the Neuse Lake has good populations of white and black crappie.

“By the book, white crappie are supposed to spawn first, but they don’t at Falls; they spawn after the black crappie,” he said. “About all of the creeks have blacks and whites, you just catch the whites later.

“It seems like there are twice as many black crappie as there are white crappie. The white crappie grow better — they’ll get a lot bigger and longer, but not as thick as a black crappie.”

King said the extremely shallow water of Falls of Neuse’s upper end — from the Cheek Road Bridge upstream to I-85 and beyond — is a big reason for the lake’s excellent crappie fishery.

“Other than being in the river channel, the upper end of the lake is hard to access,” he said. “Once you get out of the river channel, all you’ve got are big, shallow flats, so fish have these areas they can spawn where fishermen really can’t get to them.”