Three of this popular lake’s alltime anglers – David Fritts, Maynard Edwards and David Wright – offer advice about fishing “The Rock” during June.
To some folks, bass-fishing heaven may be the month of April at Buggs Island Lake when the water floods the shoreline bushes and gum trees, and everyone with a rod ties on a spinnerbait.But to a significant portion of the bass-fishing population, heaven is much different. There may be pearly gates, but they allow admission to a much smaller lake, and a few pages later on the calendar. The fishermen in the white robes with the big, shiny wings have a selection of rods on the front decks of their bass boats, and tied on the business end is a selection of crankbaits.
Welcome to High Rock Lake in June.
“If you can’t catch ’em in June, you can’t catch ’em at any time in the whole year,” said bass pro David Wright of Lexington, who cut his teeth at the 15,980-acre Yadkin River reservoir that forms much of the border between Davidson and Rowan counties.
Wright and two other Lexington notables — pro David Fritts and longtime guide Maynard Edwards — cut their teeth at High Rock, figuring out how to boat stringers of big bass out of the relatively shallow, stained lake that has developed the reputation as one of North Carolina’s best warm-weather lakes.
Things start to warm up, weather-wise, the middle of May, and it isn’t long before the fishing is really hot at High Rock, which was impounded in 1927 as part of Alcoa’s plan to build hydroelectric plants up and down the Yadkin River to produce electric power for its smelting plant 15 miles downstream at the town of Badin. High Rock is undoubtedly the most fertile of the seven lakes on the Yadkin-Pee Dee River system, and it normally holds a nice stain year-round.
“June is probably the best month of the year on High Rock — especially if you’re throwing a big crankbait,” said Fritts, who rode the lessons he learned on his home lake to the 1993 Bassmasters Classic championship and 1994 Bass Angler of the Year award. “June is a great time to go out and catch a bunch of fish.”
What happens, said Edwards, who operates Yadkin Lakes Guide Service, is most of the lake’s bass finish spawning during early May, take a couple of weeks to recover from the stress, then figure out about the same time that they’re hungry and need to eat, constantly, for a solid month.
“They bite like a mother most of the month,” he said, and they tend to seek each other’s company, heading to the bass version of the all-you-can eat buffet in groups that can range in size from a half-dozen to several dozen fish.
“Mother’s Day is when they usually start biting; that’s the day I use as the dividing line on my calendar,” said Edwards (252-249-6782). “They’re through spawning, and they’ve recuperated. I don’t like to use the word ‘schooling’ because you think topwater when you hear that, but they gang up on little corners and secondary points, and they have nothing on their minds but eating.
“Most of the guys around here will tell you June is their favorite time of year. And the good thing is, when you find one of ’em, there are usually more of them around. You can catch multiple fish at one spot.”
So for most of the month of June, bass are hanging out in groups, at places relatively easy to access.
Just think spawning areas. Now come out of that flat or pocket or cove and look for the corner or little point where there’s the first good dropoff into deeper water. If the “corner” has rocks on it, or maybe a brush pile or a stump, so much the better.
If an angler positions his boat in about 15 feet of water and casts a big crankbait up into 5 feet, he’s on his way to fishing bliss – which won’t be eternal but might last five or six weeks.
“Sometime toward the end of May is when they start biting out — maybe from the 15th of the month to the end,” said Wright, a former high-school teacher who has fished most of the nation’s and region’s best tournament circuits. “You start catching ’em 6- or 7-feet deep, and every week, it seems like they get just a little deeper. By the end of June, they’ll be 14- or 15-feet deep.”
Fritts described the process as a “gradual migration” toward deep water.
“They’re over the spawn, and they go back to feeding, and they’re 5- to 8-feet deep, then they’re out to 10 feet, the next week it’s 12,” he said. “They go to the corners outside spawning areas, then they come midway out of the creek toward the mouth of the creeks, and finally to the main lake.”
The “migration” begins close to the place that life begins — at spawning pockets. The spring water level dictates, to some extent, where the fish will spawn and where they’ll first bite after the spawn, Wright said.
“If the lake is really full, they’ll go way back in the pockets to spawn,” he said. “If there’s low water, they’ll spawn closer to the main lake — in pockets closer to the mouth of creeks.
“If the water’s been high, you need to start fishing back farther in the creeks. Go back to the pockets and find the first corner you can. If the water’s been low, that corner may only have 2 or 3 feet of water on it, so you’ll have to look out farther.
“The majority of fish spawn in April and May, and you’ll get some some extremes on both ends, but it’s pretty simple at High Rock.
“June is a month to fish crankbaits.”
Edwards, a teacher whose classroom was for years next door to Wright’s at Central Davidson High School, normally has a pretty good feel for where fish have spawned. He looks for the same “corners” that Wright does, but he has a different way of describing it.
“You fish the first little deep structure you come to,” he said. “They go to a dropoff off the end of a flat or to the mouth of a spawning cove. They spawn in all the creeks.
“I like Flat Swamp and Abbotts and Buddle creeks — it’s awesome in the spring. All the little points on the right side after you get past the fork (of the lake) will be great, and all the points in the bay where the little red island is will be great.
“If you find a cove that has a good, hard bottom for spawning and has a point close by, or a steep bank, you need to fish it. That’s the kind of place they’ll be.”
Wright keys on rock. There’s a lot of it on the lake floor and the shorelines (obviously the name of the lake gives away a clue to its geology).
“If the water is low in the spring, some of them may not go back in the pockets good, and they’ll spawn on rocks,” he said. “There are a lot of rock veins in High Rock, and they’re always good to fish near the first of June. It seems like they go from rocks to brush piles, then the bigger fish will move out on stumps. I fish rocks early, then brush and stocks.
“If you’re ever gonna be able to catch several fish at one place, it’ll be the first of June. It may vary a little year to year, but there’s a tendency for those fish to school more around the first of June. They’ll school up on a lot of places, and I expect you ought to see good schooling action the first 10 or 12 days of June.”
High Rock got its reputation as a great warm-weather lake in part because it has excellent structure that’s off the bank — structure most fishermen with depth-finders can find. There are a handful of contour lines that consistently mark good depth changes all over the lake, and fish moving out of pockets toward deeper water or out of creeks toward the main lake tend to stop and spend time on drops at those depths.
At High Rock, 10 feet and 12 feet are normally good depths to find small ledges or drops with stumps or rocks that will hold fish as they make the move from their spawning areas toward their summertime haunts.
“The most fun I’ve every had on a guide trip was one year in the second week of June,” Edwards said. “I had a 10-hour trip, and we caught 52 keepers and probably had six over 5 pounds. One of my better memories is a trip I had about the same time of year. I had a guy who brought his 11-year-old son. They’d come down from Maryland to visit somebody, and the kid was a really good fisherman.
“I got on a good spot, tied on a jig, and he caught a fish that weighed 5-11; it was his biggest fish ever. It took us about 15 minutes to shake hands and take pictures and put the fish back, and the next cast, he threw to the same spot and caught a 6-4. Both of those fish were in 9 feet of water.
“Depth is a key. If you can find the depth they’re at and the cover they’re in at one end of the lake, you’ve got it knocked because you can go all over the lake, and fish everything you can find that’s like it.
“At High Rock, there are two kinds of terms for fishing offshore. There’s an ‘out’ bite and a deep bite. The ‘out’ bite isn’t necessarily deep; it’s a bite that’s away from the bank. It could be 50 yards off the bank or 200 yards. They’ll go to boat docks some, but mostly they’ll be at little rocky secondary or main-lake points as they move out.”
Wright said by the end of June, High Rock bass will be as deep as they are all year, with fish caught around 15- or 16-feet deep. In July they move back toward the bank, but only a little bit, and they spread out, ending the opportunity to catch a five-fish limit without moving your boat.
“I lot of times, around the end of June, they’ll be the deepest they’ll be all year,” Wright said. “I think it has something to do with the oxygen in the water, but in July, they’ll move back up some.”
The bait of choice for almost all High Rock fishermen in June is the crankbait, typically, a medium-runner just after Memorial Day, with deep-runners becoming more productive as bass move out.
Wright always has been regarded as a crankbait expert; a lot of the locals that have fished against him or his team-tournament partners, Gerald Beck of Lexington or Jeff Coble of Manson, rate him as the equal of Fritts with a long rod and a deep-diving plug in hand — and Fritts is rated by most pros as the best in the country when big crankbaits start taking control.
“At High Rock in June, you’ve got to throw a crankbait,” Wright said. “I start out throwing an Ugly Duck or a Tapp; those are flat baits with square lips, and they’ll run 6- or 7-feet deep. Then as the fish move out a little, I throw a Zoom Z-2, which is like a 300 Poe’s, then a Z-3, which is like a 400 Poe’s.
“I mainly throw two colors, Classic and Chartreuse Classic. Classic has a brown back, yellow sides and a white belly. Chartreuse Classic has a brown back, chartreuse belly and yellow sides.
“The other thing is, when (bass are) around rocks, you’ve got to throw a jig, too.”
Edwards likes crankbaits first, but he’s quick to switch over to a Carolina-rigged or Texas-rigged soft-plastic bait or a jig.
“I start with my boat in 16 feet of water, where I can throw up into 5 of 6 feet,” he said.
“I like to throw a crankbait to find fish. If I’m fishing a tournament, I’ll start with a crankbait, and I’ll follow it up with a jig, a Texas-rigged worm or a Carolina-rigged lizard.
“If I’ve got a guide trip and I know fish are at a spot, I’ll give them a Carolina rig to throw. One thing I learned years ago is that if you can catch three or four fish on a spot on a crankbait, and you think it’s time to move, don’t leave that spot until you back it up with a jig or a Carolina rig.
“Usually, the last one you catch at a spot will be the biggest one. If you catch three fish on a spot, the third one will be the biggest.”
Edwards’ early-June crankbait lure is likely to be a Lohr’s Little Cassie, a flat-sided bait built by Lexington’s Jerry Lohr — Fritts’ former tournament partner and a fantastic crankbait fishermen in his own right — that will run 8- to 10-feet deep.
Fritts likes the popular “parrot” color — chartreuse with a blue back. But when bass start to gradually work their way out into deeper water, he switches up to a Rapala DT-14 or a Poe’s Series 400 — serious deep-diving plugs.
Edwards likes to fish a 6-inch lizard — green pumpkin with a tail dyed chartreuse — on a Carolina rig. By the middle of June, he’ll downsize to a green pumpkin or Junebug colored centipede or french-fry worm, or he’ll start to crawl or swim a jig across the bottom, going with a green pumpkin jig and like-colored plastic chunk or a black/blue jig and chunk.
Lastly, he’ll pick up an 11-inch plastic worm (red shad, green pumpkin or red/black core) and fish it with a Texas rig and a half-ounce slip sinker.
If there’s a lake in North Carolina where the quality and quantity of fish is a match for High Rock, it’s either Lake Wylie or Buggs Island Lake. All three are know for extremely good numbers of good, solid bass in the 3- to 4-pound neighborhood, but they don’t produce the 8- and 10-pound lunkers that regularly come from the three “trophy” lakes around the Raleigh-Durham area — Falls of Neuse, Jordan or Shearon Harris.
“Three- or 4-pound fish are very common — they make up the majority of your spawning fish,” Edwards said. “Most of your tournaments in May and June will be won with between 21 or 22 pounds — a good (five-fish) limit of 4-pounders. You’ll see limits anywhere from 15 to 22 pounds regularly.”
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