Mark Taylor

Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.

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• Dealing with buck fever
• Fortunes vary during hunting season
• Trout action hot on coast

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BASSETT -- With a subtle splat, the little green popper landed next to the dead tree resting in the shallows. And then it was gone.

"There's one," said my fishing partner, Sam Dean.

He reared back on his fly rod -- and launched a 3-inch-long bluegill 15 feet into the air.

"At least it's a fish," he said, laughing.

For Sam, this was an ice-breaker, his first catch of our summer-long quest to explore some of Virginia's small public fishing lakes.

In our first adventure, Sam had drawn a big blank at Lexington Reservoir, where the brook trout were swimming at depths well out of reach of the fly fishing tackle Sam stubbornly refuses to put down.

Even before we started, things seemed certain to be different this evening.

We were on Fairy Stone Lake, a quaint warmwater reservoir at the state park with which it shares its name.

Fairy Stone Lake is loaded with bluegills, so it's the kind of place where a fly angler or someone with ultralight spinning gear can have a ball pitching tiny poppers or small pieces of bait into the shallows on a warm summer evening.

But as tempting as it was to fool with panfish, bass were to be my priority this evening.

And Fairy Stone Lake has plenty of them, too.

Mark Taylor | The Roanoke Times

Roanoke Times photographer Sam Dean used a colorful surface popper to trick this chunky largemouth bass during a recent fishing trip to Fairy Stone Lake in Patrick County.

Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times

ark Taylor takes in the scenery after an evening of fishing earlier this month at Fairy Stone Lake, located in Fairy Stone State Park. The lake, located in Patrick County, adjoins the Philpott Reservoir and covers 168 acres.

Tucked-Away Treasures

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• Lexington Reservoir is worth the effort

Like at many small lakes in Virginia, the dynamics of the bass population have changed over the years.

Biologists with the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries found that until the late 1980s, many fishermen were keeping bass once they hit 12 inches.

Bass fishing was, as would be expected, poor.

But catch-and-release fishing has become more common at the lake and the bass population has responded.

When the game department last conducted a full-blown electroshock sampling at the lake, in 2005, largemouth bass averaged a respectable 15 inches, with fish up to 21 inches available. Biologists characterized the lake's bass fishing opportunities as "excellent."

Conditions seemed excellent, too, on the recent June day when Sam and I made the one-hour drive to the lake from Roanoke.

Summertime bass are often sluggish until sundown, but bright sun was not an issue on this evening. The sun was hidden behind thick clouds, with those clouds dumping a steady, heavy rain on us.

Not only can fishing be good in rainy, cloudy conditions, but we had the water to ourselves.

The lake, which adjoins Philpott Reservoir, covers 168 acres. The shoreline is undeveloped, save for a few state park facilities, such as cabins, a swimming beach and a small dock for rental boats.

Shore fishing is available in a few spots, but the best way to cover a decent amount of water is by boat, on which only trolling motors are allowed.

Boaters launch their craft at a recently repaved ramp right across from the park's swimming beach.

For a while after we launched my 15-foot-long johnboat, it seemed we might not be going far.

The trolling motor's foot pedal would turn the motor in only one direction. Also worrisome, the motor's battery power indicator was showing dangerously low power, even though I had just recharged both of my batteries.

Eventually the motor started functioning correctly, though the power warnings remained. Not wanting to have to paddle too far back to the ramp, we stayed relatively close just in case the batteries were to fail.

That was fine as there is plenty of good looking shoreline cover all around the lake.

I suspected a wacky-rigged soft jerkbait such a Senko would probably work well. But because of the low light I decided to start with a topwater approach, tying on a Stanley Ribbit.

The Ribbit is a soft plastic lure with legs that churn when the lure is reeled across the surface. Largely weedless, such so-called buzz toads can be effective surface lures when fished around the kind of heavy woody cover found along Fairy Stone Lake's shoreline.

But while Sam's fly rod popper was continuing to draw interest from small bluegill, the toad was being ignored.

That finally changed as I reeled it over a submerged log and a 15-inch largemouth swam up and hammered the lure.

Afterwards, hits came regularly enough to keep me from trying another lure. The total tally for the evening was four good takes, with three 15-inch bass in the boat.

Looking to move up from the sunfish, Sam tied on a larger bass popper and started working it in the heavy shoreline cover.

Soon, he was battling a fat bass.

By then it was 8 p.m., the rain had stopped and the skies were starting to clear.

Having worked our way back to an area we had already fished, we anchored in the mouth of a cove and changed tactics.

Fairy Stone Lake has some nice channel catfish, so we baited up three catfish rods with live nightcrawlers, pitched them out and waited.

We wanted to be off the lake by dark, so I didn't expect much to happen. Not much did, with our only catch a 10-inch-long bullhead.

That was fine.

It's tough not to enjoy being on a small, quiet Virginia lake as the sun drops over the horizon.