Photo by Ron Sinfelt

Joel Richardson of Kernersville has fished for largemouth bass just about everywhere possible over the past 15 years as a guide and professional fisherman.

He has guided on a handful of lakes, spent countless hours on Buggs Island and Lake Gaston, and has developed a love for a number of different reservoirs in North Carolina.

But he really fell in love this year with a lake that is, by all accounts, turning into the Tar Heel State's top bass factory: Shearon Harris Lake.

"I have fished Shearon Harris in the last year more than I've ever fished it in my whole life," said Richardson, who has had plenty of success fishing the FLW Tournament Trail when he's not guiding somewhere in North Carolina. "It is, without a doubt, the best public water for bass we have; it's a lot better than anywhere else for big fish and numbers.

"When you can go to a lake in August and catch a 7-4 and a 9-11 bass on the same trip, that's awesome," Richardson said (336-643-7214).

Shearon Harris, a 4,100-acre CP&L reservoir between Raleigh and Sanford, wasn't much when it was first impounded in the early 1980s. It wasn't much until the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission jump-started the baitfish population with a stocking of shad in the late 1980s, around the time that an exotic aquatic weed called hydrilla showed up and at about the same time that CP&L changed the way it was cleaning its nuclear power plant and started pouring a lot of liquid phosphates into the water -- fertilizing it, as it were.

In the 1990s, perhaps no reservoir was as consistently good for largemouth bass as Shearon Harris, and nothing has changed since the turn of the century -- except for a change in management by the commission that may have given the lake a shot in the arm.

Fearing that its popularity might be a problem in terms of fishing pressure, the commission changed the daily creel and size limits on the lake, going to a 16- to 20-inch slot limit that virtually ensures that any bass that reaches 2 1/2 pounds is going to eventually become a 5-pounder before anybody can take it home.

Guide Phil Cable, a veteran of lakes in the Raleigh-Durham area, believes that the slot limit has helped Shearon Harris get a leg up on Jordan Lake and Falls of the Neuse, the other two reservoirs that attract many fishermen.

"I don't think Falls or Jordan are going downhill at all; they're just real lakes now," Cable said. "But I think the slot has helped Shearon Harris as far as the bass fishing is concerned. That's kept the fishing pressure from affecting it as much as it could have. And I'm glad the hydrilla is there because that helps a lot. It keeps the food in front of them, and it keeps fishermen from being able to catch too many of them."

Cable expects to spend the majority of his time on Shearon Harris and Jordan this year, in part because of their proximity to his home in Holly Springs, and because he believes both lakes are going to be very productive.

"Last spring at Jordan, we started to see the bigger fish again, and we hadn't seen them in a while," Cable said (919-815-1185). "I had some 8-pound fish in my boat this year, and I heard of some club tournaments where 9- and 10-pound fish were caught. I guess it just goes in cycles. It's probably the same way with Falls."

Well, maybe not. Biologist Bill Collart of Rocky Mount surveys all three lakes on an annual basis, and he said that none of them has really fallen off any.