"You know, for a few years, it just exploded on Falls, Harris and Jordan," he said. "Harris hasn't let up any. For five of six years, fishermen were going there and complaining that the locals were the only ones catching fish, but now it looks like they've found out how to catch them.

"I haven't seen any changes at Harris. It certainly hasn't dropped off. It's a quality fishery. Falls and Jordan get a lot of pressure, and I hope I don't see the day when they start dropping off."

Fishermen at Falls of the Neuse, in particular, have plenty to look forward to this year. Last spring, Collart said that electroshocking surveys were fantastic, with almost twice as many fish sampled for the length of time the biologists spent on the water. And there appears to be a tremendous class of 3- and 4-year-old bass that's about to explode on the lake.

"This past spring, our shocking was phenomenal. We sampled twice as many fish as usual in half the amount of time, and I'd say they were mostly 3- and 4-year-old fish. Fish in those year-classes were piled in the lake like cordwood -- and we still had the usual really big fish in there, too."

Collart also looks after the fisheries at Buggs Island Lake and Lake Gaston, and he said the bass populations have been so strong on those lakes along the Virginia border that biologists from the two states are only sampling every other year.

"They're holding their own at Buggs Island and Gaston; we're only going up there every other year because they're so consistent," he said. "And even though Gaston has cleared up -- the hydrilla has sucked all the nutrients out of the lake -- our sampling still shows the same things it always did. There are fish all over that lake, especially around docks, riprap and points."

The lakes of the Yadkin River system are bass producers year in and year out. According to biologist Tony Mullis of Denton, it's just a matter of the fertility of the entire system. The waters in High Rock, Tuckertown, Badin, Tillery and Blewett Falls are tremendously productive in terms of a variety of game fish species -- bass in particular, despite their relatively old age. Most lakes were impounded in the 1920s.

"Productivity is a lot of it," said Mullis, who supervises management of all Piedmont reservoirs. "Those lakes are very productive. They get a lot of effluent from the bigger population centers in the area, and that's going right into raising fish."

High Rock is the biggest of the major Yadkin system reservoirs at around 15,000 acres. With the exception of W. Kerr Scott Reservoir in the mountains of Wilkes County near the headwaters of the river, High Rock is farther upstream than the rest of the Yadkin reservoirs. As such, it gets the most use of the nutrients pouring into the river.

"I think High Rock is probably a little better; it's more productive than the rest, probably because it's farther up the river," Mullis said. "It's just a big, shallow mud hole (a local description), but it's really good. It's certainly more productive than some of the reservoirs farther downstream, like the CP&L reservoirs, Tillery and Blewett Falls."

The bass fishing is reasonably similar in most of the Yadkin reservoirs, except W. Kerr Scott, which is an excellent fall and winter reservoir, owing to a great population of spotted bass and its deeper, clearer nature.

High Rock has the deserved reputation of being an excellent hot-weather reservoir, in part because it is full of excellent offshore structure, and it is a great boat-dock lake for shallow-water fishermen.

High Rock's bass fishery has totally recovered from the tremendous drought and 23-foot drawdown of 2002.