A crackerjack spawn every two or three years is normally enough to keep the whole cycle of life spinning.

So crappie populations don't rise and fall on an annual basis, depending on how many little slabs survive through their first summer. It takes a handful of bad years in a row to negatively affect the population on any given body of water.

Once upon a time, biologists thought that momma crappie did such a great job having babies that no amount of fishing pressure could affect the status of a lake's fishery.

Now, they apparently know better. And they are putting size and creel limits in place on various lakes where it appears that slabs need a little lift to keep up with the demand for flaky white filets.

The fortunes of slab populations in lakes and rivers around North Carolina don't vary too much from year to year. That, however, doesn't mean that biologists with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission aren't able to point fishermen in the right direction when they ask about places to fish.

"The same old lakes we always talk about are still good," said Christian Waters of Smithfield, a biologist who is charge of fisheries management on reservoirs in the Piedmont. "Buggs Island, Gaston, Falls of Neuse, Badin, High Rock, Tuckertown, the ones that have always been decent fisheries will probably be decent again this year."

From one end of the Tar Heel State to the other, apparently, the lakes and rivers that have produced bragging-sized stringers of bragging-sized crappie for years will probably do so again this year. We'll take a region-by-region look at some of the tried-and-true hotspots around the state.

PIEDMONT NORTH CAROLINA
If you're talking about the best places to catch quality slab crappie in North Carolina, more than likely you're talking about the rolling hills of the Piedmont, that 200-mile-wide swatch of land between the fall line and the mountains.

A majority of the state's most productive reservoirs are in the Piedmont, and so, not coincidentally, are most of the crappie.

No discussion of crappie fishing can leave out places like Buggs Island Lake, High Rock Lake, Tuckertown Lake, Jordan Lake, Lake Wylie and Falls of Neuse Lake. That big handful of larger reservoirs has been the center of North Carolina's crappie-fishing universe for years. Biologists have weighed in with creel and size limits on a handful of them to try to offset the enormous amount of fishing pressure they receive -- to make sure that an enormous harvest or two and a couple of poor spawns won't leave the lakes' brushpiles and creek channels barren of crappie.

As far as Waters is concerned, Falls of Neuse Lake north of Raleigh and Durham remains a top fishery.

"It's as good as it has ever been," he said. "It really seems to stay in good shape, year after year. Buggs Island is the same way, and Gaston seems to be in pretty good shape, even though we don't tend to catch the numbers of fish at Gaston as we do on other reservoirs when we sample. However, the problem is, you have a good deal of piers and development, and it makes it more difficult for us to collect fish. The best thing to say is that it's more about our ability to sample them than the fishery itself."