Yow said that Hiwassee Lake is a place getting special attention from the commission, in part because the influx of blueback herring has apparently caused a great deal of damage to the walleye fishery, while helping out smallmouth bass by providing a different kind of forage they can easily use.

Also, spotted bass have apparently taken hold in Hiwassee in good numbers, but Yow doesn't see any adverse effect on the largemouth or smallmouth populations.

"We ought to go into the winter with a pretty good crop of young-of-the-year bass there," he said.

Biologist Chad Thomas said there's a pretty good batch of 2-year-old fish in the coastal rivers in the northeastern corner of the state where the fishery is still recovering from massive kills during Hurricane Isabel in the fall of 2003.

The commission made three experimental stockings of largemouths between October 2004 and the spring of 2005, with three different size fish, and only the biggest ones -- 8 inches long when stocked in the spring of 2004 -- have survived and prospered.

"The 8-inch fish we put in, we've found a good percentage of them, and we feel like they made a contribution to the fishery," Thomas said. "We think the fish we stocked probably make up 25 to 30 percent of all the fish we sampled last spring that were in the 10- to 11-inch class. Those fish should have been 12 to 13 inches long by the fall, and they should be 14-inch fish this spring.

"They would have contributed to the spawn in the spring of 2005, and we know some of them are being caught -- which is what we put them out there for."

Thomas said that bass populations in a handful of rivers -- the Roanoke, Chowan, Cashie, Pasquotank and Scuppernong -- that had severe fish kills as a result of Isabel are recovering pretty much on schedule. Fishermen shouldn't expect them to be at full strength by this spring, but by 2007, well, Thomas is hopeful.

"Although we have found a lot of the fish we stocked, what's more encouraging is that fish in these rivers are following the same pattern they were after the kills we had from Hurricane Floyd in '99," he said. "What we've found is, if we are patient and give them four or five years, the fishery will rebuild itself.

"I think there were more bass that survived Isabel than we gave them credit for. We don't know where they went, but they're moving back into areas of the rivers," Thomas said. "We were just about recovered from Floyd when Isabel showed up, and we're just going to have to limp ourselves back to where we were before. We've learned that stocking isn't the answer; we need to hope and pray that we don't have a hurricane every year."

Thomas thinks the Roanoke is recovering from the devastation of Isabel faster than some of its neighbors. For one thing, there were areas on the river -- upstream from Williamston, plus the Devil's Gate and Three Sisters areas -- where bass didn't take that big a hit. After the hurricane, the 2004 spawn was apparently an excellent one, he said, and fish have started to spread out, moving back into areas that were left barren by Isabel.

Once the immediate effects of the hurricane are over, these river systems return to being good habitat but with lower densities of fish. For the fish that remain, life is good. For fish in other reaches of the river, that uncrowded habitat is attractive as well.

"The habitat in these systems, especially in the Roanoke, is fantastic; it's as good as you'll get on the coast," Thomas said. "Every year, it will get better on the Roanoke because the fish will migrate up and down the system. They'll move and fill in the vacuum."