IT'S EARLY, BUT ANGLERS CATCHING LOTS OF LARGE BASS

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, February 27, 1992                   TAG: 9202270028
SECTION: SPORTS                    PAGE: C2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
IT'S EARLY, BUT ANGLERS CATCHING LOTS OF LARGE BASS
Bass fishermen waiting for the big catches of the March-April spawning season might miss the party this time.
The bass are doing strange things. So are other species.
A couple of weeks ago, two Gaston Lake fishermen were probing the depths for stripers with Hopkins spoons. What they found were largemouth bass, in large numbers and large sizes. They landed about 50 bass, five weighing more than 8 pounds apiece.
It was a catch right out of the 1960s, but what really was strange was that the fish appeared to be in full spawn. Their tails were battered and bloody, as if they were fanning beds.
"It was like you took a pair of scissors and cut them off on a slant up the middle of the tail," said Monty Rainey of South Hill.
There's more. The fish were caught deep - 20 to 25 feet. Anglers normally expect to find spawning fish in the shallows.
These bass were so deep that, when the anglers attempted to practice catch-and-release, some of the fish began to belly up behind their boat.
"You could tell the air bladder was extended," Rainey said. "So they picked some of them up and brought them in."
Last week, the fishermen showed videos of their catch at their bass club, where Rainey, a writer for the South Hill Enterprise, is a member.
The questions Rainey raises: Were the bass spawning deep or had they spawned shallow and were chased back to the depths by a cold front? And why were they in full spawn so early?
Technical literature reveals largemouths will spawn anywhere from 2 to 20 feet, said Bill Kittrell Jr., a state fish biologist assigned to the Gaston-Kerr lakes area.
"But typically, they would come up in the shallows," he said. "Since the tails were really worn out, like they had been fanning beds, it could be that they were up and in a spawning mode in the shallows when we were having warm weather. Then, when the temperatures dropped they headed back deep. It might even have been a daily cycle that they were in."
Either way, it is extremely early for a spawn, Kittrell said.
"With this warm weather, the way the temperatures have been, it wouldn't surprise me if everything doesn't move up a couple of weeks."
Bass in Kerr Lake, just upstream from Gaston, are in the shallows early but show no signs of spawning, Rainey said after observing a tournament Sunday.
What they were doing was chasing every kind of lure tossed their way.
"The only thing you had to do - the key to this - was put it in front of the fish," Rainey said. "The winning weight was 40.56 pounds. You had to have over 30 pounds to be in the top five. Tenth place was 22.48 pounds. There were numerous strings in the 20-pound range."
And it wasn't a single-day fluke. Two anglers, Kirk Gravett and Mac Elliott, caught 27 bass one day and 32 the next in pretournament practice.
The winning catch in the one-day, partners tournament was landed on spinnerbaits. The tournament's lunker, a 7.52-pounder, took a pig-and-jig. Most were in 2 to 4 feet of water, holding to pea-size gravels or larger rocks.
So why were the Kerr fish shallow and the Gaston bass deep?
Water temperature could be a factor, but Rainey believes the lack of cover and the increasing boating traffic on Gaston is driving bass to a deep-water pattern. That, unfortunately, is making them increasingly difficult to release, since they often suffer from an over-inflated swim bladder when reeled from the depths.
Rainey is initiating a campaign to teach anglers how to use a hypodermic needle to release the pressure and allow deep-caught bass a chance to survive.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB