Put-and-take trout fisheries in North Carolina have not been evaluated since the early 1970s. In the intervening time, stocking frequencies and stocking rates of individual streams have evolved at the discretion of innumerable fishery biologists. Since so little was known about the characteristics of these fisheries, the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission conducted pilot creel surveys on 6 streams in 1997. The objective of these surveys was to obtain fishing pressure patterns and angler trip characteristics for use in designing statistically valid and efficient creels in subsequent years. The pilot creel work schedules were subjectively determined with the day of stocking as the beginning of each period. Beginning with the afternoon of each stocking day, morning and afternoon work periods were alternated. Major changes in future put-and-take creel survey designs resulting from this study include: reducing the defined work day by 2 hours, changing the probability of selecting morning and afternoon work periods from 0.5:0.5 to 0.35:0.65, and changing the stratification of work days from weekend days and weekdays to stocking day plus 4 days following and remaining days until the next stocking. These design changes were implemented in 1998 and are expected to improve the precision of the statistical estimators of these creels.