Thursday, May 14, 2009
Smith Mountain Lake to get a reduced striped bass stocking
Bill Cochran
Recent columns
Big striped bass, bearing a heavy cargo of eggs and milt, have been bulling their way up the Roanoke River above Kerr Lake where some have been captured for use in the state’s Brookneal Hatchery. The crop of fingerlings they produce will provide fish for Smith Mountain Lake, but not in the numbers of past years.
State fish officials say they are scheduled to stock 250,000 fingerlings in the 20,000-acre lake this year. That is well under the stocking rate of the past decade, which has averaged about 410,000 fingerlings annually.
The brakes are being applied for two basic reasons, according to Dan Wilson, Department of Game and Inland Fisheries biologist who manages the lake’s fishery. There is a decline in the number of small forage fish that serve as food for the fast-growing stripers and there has been a modest slowdown in the growth rate of young stripers, which could be a sign of overcrowding.
“We are no longer locked into a specific number of stripers for stocking every year,” said Wilson. “The basic stocking number is 350,000 per year, but may increase or decrease depending on fishery conditions, shad dynamics and striper growth rates.”
Samples a couple weeks ago revealed that the threadfin shad population, which is a food source for stripers, took a heavy hit this winter when temperatures plunged and stayed low.
“We never saw a threadfin, so it appears there were not very many that made it,” said Wilson.
This wasn’t entirely unexpected since threadfin don't tolerate cold temperatures, at least not as well as gizzard shad and alewives, the other major forage fish species in the lake.
Wilson isn’t losing any sleep over the decline in threadfins.
“I am happy they took a good hit in 2009 since the numbers were starting to climb much higher than I would like to see,” he said.
Last year, the breakdown of forage fish was 68 percent gizzard shad; 26 percent threadfin shad and 6 percent alewives. The threadfins likely have dropped to near 2003 and 2004 levels when they registered zero.
The idea is to keep the lake’s population of stripers and other predator game fish in balance with the food supply. When it gets out of kilter, bad things can happen, including a crash in the striper population like the one that occurred in 2003 when big fish bellied up.
Wilson has to deal with fishermen who believe the answer to improving the striper fishery simply is to boost the stocking rate. The fact is, overstocking can cause more problems than it solves. Sometimes it is easier to manage the fish than it is the fishermen.
Catches of big stripers slowly are returning to the lake, although nothing like they were in the mid-1970s when citations reached 725 annually and the lake was ballyhooed as one of the best landlocked striper hot spots in the world.
Last year, anglers registered 46 striper citations from Smith Mountain, a figure that likely will be topped this season.
You can get an idea of how big-fish catches have improved by looking at the results of the recent Optimist Club of Cave Spring tournament on the lake. The winning catch weighed 29.12 pounds and the runner-up was 21.06 pounds.
That’s not a return to the good old days, but it represents improvement and hope.
