The Yadkin-Pee Dee system may be the state's most productive as far as crappie populations are concerned. Several years ago, biologists feared that fishing pressure had grown so heavy that there was the potential for problems if reproduction went down. That led to the 8-inch size minimums and 20-fish daily limits now in place on High Rock, Tuckertown, Badin, Falls, Tillery and Blewett Falls reservoirs.

"We have good growth rates down there, and all the lakes are doing real well," Waters said. "We put the creel and size regulations in there to protect fish so they could get in an another spawn before most of them were caught."

On the Catawba chain, the best fishing is at the bottom -- in Lake Wylie outside the Charlotte city limits. It has been considered for years to be the jewel of the Catawba system for crappie, as well as largemouth bass. Reproduction and growth rates are so good that the commission hasn't had to institute creel or size limits, and the lake annually produces both good numbers of fish and numbers of good fish in the 1- to 1 1/2-pound range. The commission teamed up with South Carolina biologists to do extensive sampling on Wylie last fall, but results weren't available at press time.

Lake Norman, the 32,500-acre reservoir northwest of Charlotte, was placed under the creel and size limits in July 2004.

"Norman is obviously not the top lake around for crappie, but we are getting better growth rates there compared with other lakes," Waters said. "At Norman, crappie are able to use a little different kind of habitat and forage than the stripers there, and in that sense, they seem to be doing OK.

"Our biggest concern is that the alewives and river herring (stocked by individuals and striper fishing clubs) might replace portions of the threadfin shad population. When that occurs -- and it's already happened a little -- we're worried that if crappie feed basically on the threadfins, and the threadfins are replaced by a slightly larger baitfish, that won't be advantageous to the crappie. It's hard to say what will happen. So far, what data we have suggests the impact has been minimal, but we'll be looking at it quite a bit, and we're going to study alewives and bluebacks, largemouth bass, stripers, crappie and other species to determine potentially who's eating who, and what species compete for the same baitfish."

That leaves three very interesting fisheries up for discussion: B. Everett Jordan Lake south of Durham, its neighbor to the southeast, Shearon Harris Lake, and Blewett Falls Lake, the farthest downstream of any of the lakes on the Yadkin-Pee Dee system.

Jordan has long been considered North Carolina's blue-ribbon crappie fishery. Almost since it was impounded in the early 1980s, fishermen have flocked to Jordan from all over North Carolina, and a great many have returned to their homes with coolers filled with slab-sized crappie.

But several years ago, biologists started noticing some interesting things. Their fall trap-net surveys began to show that, every year, more and more fish were belonging to fewer and fewer year-classes.