ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Monday, May 6, 1996                    TAG: 9605060119
SECTION: SPORTS                   PAGE: C-8  EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN OUTDOOR EDITOR 

CRAPPIE - SUDDENLY, A LOT OF MOUTHS TO FEED AT SMITH MOUNTAIN LAKE

When you reach into your bait bucket for another minnow and none is there, it's a sure bet the crappie are biting.

It was that kind of outing on Smith Mountain Lake for Ricky Salyers of Roanoke.

``Last week, I went to the lake with four dozen minnows and ran out in 21/2 hours and came back up here [to Roanoke] to buy some more and there were no more to buy,'' Salyers said.

The Fishing Hole in Southeast Roanoke was out. So was the Minnow Pond, as was Richards along Hardy Road on the way to the lake. And the last wiggly minnow at Henry's in Vinton had gone out the door in a minnow bucket, Salyers said.

Suddenly, at Smith Mountain, there are a lot of mouths to feed.

Anglers have been reporting the best crappie fishing in a decade, maybe more than two decades. Schools of crappie - some of them skillet-fillers - are crowding the downed trees, hiding under docks and holding to stumps.

The warming temperatures have lured them into the shallows, where they are about to dump their heavy cargo of eggs like a freighter emptying its ballast. That makes them easy to find. It is like the good old days. It is family fun time, and you don't have to have a $25,000 bass or striper boat to enjoy it.

Salyers, 27, fishes from a canoe and johnboat. He often won't move more than a couple hundred yards during a day's fishing.

``If you are catching crappie in one place, why go somewhere else just to try to find them,'' he said.

Some days, one tree is all you need.

``My son and two grandsons went down there and every tree we stopped at we caught crappie,'' said Fallon Arthur Sr. of Roanoke. ``One tree we stopped at we caught crappie all day long, until we just tired of it. We got 80-some.''

Fallon often takes along 10-dozen minnows, which endears him to bait dealers, including David Webb of the Fishing Hole.

``There is not a lot of finesse involved in crappie fishing,'' Webb said. ``The old bobber, light line and minnow trick works for everybody. If you get it in the right place, it doesn't matter who is on the other end of it. I don't care how long the bobber has been sucked down before you realize it. Nine times out of 10, the fish already has hooked himself.''

Once you find them - and that is the key to success - crappie appear to take a bait or lure joyously. And where you find one, there will be another, and still another. They are a school fish. They move in schools, they feed in schools, they make love in schools. About the only thing that can mess you up in the spring is a blast of cold weather or wind, and there has been plenty of that this season.

While catching school-size crappie can be relatively easy when the population is on an upturn, getting big ones is another matter. Big crappie can be as elusive as big bass or big stripers or big trout.

Arthur, who stalks jumbo-size crappie, won the crappie category in last year's Cave Spring Optimist Club tournament with a 2.3-pound fish. That was small compared with several he said he'd hooked and lost.

``I like just a regular, old tree that has been in the water a long time - say one that goes out in there 30 or 40 feet,'' Arthur said. ``I will get right into the middle of the tree and fish both ways until I find the fish. When I find them, I sit right there and don't move anymore.''

The quality of crappie fishing this year has surprised even biologists.

``During our samplings, crappie abundance was just astonishingly high, way above what we have seen in the past,'' said Mike Duval, a fisheries biologist supervisor assigned to Smith Mountain Lake.

There appears to be one, maybe two, huge year classes in the lake, following a string of down years, Duval said. He isn't certain why - perhaps it has to do with weather patterns - but he hopes additional research will provide clues.

What is certain, Duval said, ``It is a welcome sight.''

LENGTH: Medium:   76 lines
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO:  BILL COCHRAN/Staff. 1. Crappie are a brush-loving 
          species, a fact that has Ricky Salyers prowling the shoreline of 
          Smith Mountain Lake 2. (at top) to locate spots where a dunked 
          minnow brings a strike. color.