Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 28, 1993 TAG: 9303280062
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: D12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
(1) One-third of an hour?
(2) Three hours?
(3) Thirteen hours?
Here's a clue. Smith Mountain produced 71 percent of Virginia's striped bass citation catches (fish 20 pounds or more) during the 1992 season. That included the 44-pound, 14-ounce state record.
Even so, the answer, unfortunately, is No. 3.
So if you are a striped bass fisherman, better take your lunch - maybe even your supper - when you go to Smith Mountain. And if you are a casual fisherman, better plan to spend a night or two. The amount of effort per striper caught leaps to 29 hours for you.
Those are some of the figures released last week by the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries after the agency's 1992 creel survey on the 20,000-acre lake.
Mike Duval, a state fish biologist, presented about an hour's worth of statistics to a group of fishermen gathered at the Moneta Elementary School. Several in attendance were lake guides; many wore blue caps with "Smith Mountain Striper Club" written on them.
One man rose to eulogize "the good old days." He used his hands to make popping sounds, saying that's what you'd hear a number of years ago when huge schools of stripers would wallow on the surface in pursuit of shad.
"You don't hear that anymore," he said.
So when Duval presented figures showing that the catch rate in 1992 was about the same as in 1977, the group did some groaning.
"That's just unrealistic," said Bob King, a lake guide. "Anybody who fished here in '77 and '78 knows it's not even close. You have to work hard to catch a limit of two now."
There was a difference of opinion on the number of baitfish in the lake, too. Duval's graph of kilograms of shad per hectare revealed a steady decline since 1988. Fishermen say the shad population is increasing.
"I think anybody who fishes here has noticed an increase in the shad," said King. "We can put you in shad so thick you can walk across them."
Shad have been a major food source for stripers, so when fish officials see their numbers decline they tend to cut back on stockings, which have dropped from a high of 809,000 in 1979 to an average of about 300,000 during recent years.
Some anglers still believe that there is a simple answer to improving the fishing: Stock more stripers. Fish officials say that could cause more harm than good.
In spite of the differences, there was evidence at the Moneta meeting that fish officials and fisherman have a better understanding of one another than they did three or four years ago. They see each other as allies. In fact, striper club members gave 120 hours of volunteer effort to the creel survey, and they likely will play a role in future biological research.
"Everybody has worked hard to get to this point," said King, who in the past has been a major critic of the state's management of the lake. "I think they [the biologists] have a lot of valid information - some of it I don't agree with - and that is why we are going to continue to work and try to get the information that will tell us where we need to go. Can we put more fish in or can we not?"
Fisheries management isn't an exact science, said Duval, who described it as "a game of trial and error." But when he said the Smith Mountain study is scheduled to go through 2001, one fishermen replied, "I'll be too old to fish by then."
"Where we intend to go from here is to evaluate the stocking rates and stocking methods," Duval said.
There will be no boost in the number of stripers stocked this year - about 275,000 are scheduled - but plans call for releasing 25,000 that are older and larger than the traditional 1 1/2-inch fingerlings. These may be able to leap what biologists view as a food shortage for fish during their first year of life. But it will take a couple of seasons to analyze their success.
So the anglers in the blue hats walked off into the night facing 13 hours of fishing before their next catch.
by CNB