The Jordan Lake crappie kill in 2011 also nearly ruined fishing at nearby Shearon Harris Lake last year — at least that’s what guide Freddie Sinclair of Clayton believes.
“When things got bad for crappie at Jordan after the fish kill, a lot of guys went to Harris,” he said. “But that put so much pressure on Harris’s fish, and it’s a small lake, it really hurt crappie (numbers) there.”
Sinclair said physical events and heightened angling pressure can affect the quality of a lake’s crappie population. Anglers like to keep large fish, but once taken out of a lake, large female spawners obviously don’t pass on their genetics, leaving smaller fish to spawn and creating smaller offspring.
“I want to talk to Jessica Baumann of the (N.C. Wildlife Resources) Commission about considering a 12- to 14-inch slot limit for crappie at Jordan Lake,” he said. “Grenada Lake in Mississippi is the nation’s top crappie lake, and you can’t keep a fish over 12 inches. People catch lots of 3- and 4-pound crappie at Grenada Lake.”
Grenada Lake has a 20-fish daily creel limit, but no fish longer than 12 inches may be kept.
“It was a major thing to increase the crappie size limit from 8 to 10 inches at Jordan Lake,” said Baumann, the Commission’s District 5 fisheries biologist. “We wouldn’t want to (change size limits), because the lake’s just starting to come back. That fishery is on the rebound. There’s no biological reason to do something like that.”
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