Cooler water has jump-started bite at RDU-area lake
Sportsmen who aren’t enamored with the idea of sitting in a tree stand all day can turn to Jordan Lake for some of the year’s best fishing. Waters have cooled and turned on largemouth bass and crappie bites.
“Jordan fishing is really good now,” said guide Jeff Thomas of Broadway. “I know a lot of guys, including me, complained about the lake this summer, but it’s really turned on.”
Thomas won a bass tournament at Jordan this past Sunday, fishing by himself after his scheduled partner – his daughter – was called in unexpectedly to work. Thomas still put a five-fish limit weighing 19.8 pounds on the scales.
“They bit like I’ve never seen before,” he said. “It had to do with the wind.”
Thomas (919-770-4654) used a buzzbait and spinnerbait on the bluebird-clear day to catch more than two limits of bass. He culled his entire livewell after noon.
“I started early with the buzzbait and caught a limit pretty quick with the wind blowing on rocks or wood,” he said. “Then it quit blowing about 10 a.m., and I got nervous. Then it picked up at noon, and I blistered them again. I culled everything I had.”
Thomas biggest bass weighed five pounds, while the tourney’s lunker fish weighed a little more than seven.
“Anything that had wind blowing on it – rocky banks, the backs of creeks and rocky flats – had bass,” he said. “I fished deeper water at windy points with a spinnerbait.”
But Thomas said some of his recent clients have bypassed bass to chase crappie, and that fishery also is top drawer.
“I found a school, and me and a client caught 45 in one day, with most of them 1 pound or bigger,” said Thomas, who used jigged a quarter-ounce spoon while his client used live minnows. “The largest one weighed 1¾ pounds. We didn’t have any trouble catching keeper fish.”
“I got right over them, and we’d drop his bait or my spoon down to them,” said Thomas, who found the crappie 14 to 15 feet deep over a mid-lake hump. “I told my client he needed to have a little patience because I was using my structure scanner to look for ’em. Once I found them, we never moved.”
