"Spotted bass (numbers) are probably growing a little at Hiwassee, but they're not taking over like they did at Chatuge, displacing the smallmouths, because the habitat is a little different," said Yow, who believes that angler introduction of blueback herring as a forage fish has changed the fishery forever.

"Spotted bass and smallmouth bass both utilize bluebacks better than largemouths," Yow said. "At Hiwassee, the smallmouth bass seem to be the beneficiaries of the change in the forage base -- at least in the short term. But if you look, anywhere you have spotted bass and blueback herring together, well, the spots are probably in the right place at the right time for that. You can see that at Lake Norman, Chatuge, and to a lesser extent, W. Kerr Scott."

Flatland fishing
For bass fishermen who frequent coastal rivers, the news from biologists has been good.

Chad Thomas of the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission has been in charge of a program that aimed to replenish the largemouth bass fishery that was crippled by Hurricane Isabel in September 2003 and the resulting fish kill in the Roanoke and Chowan watersheds.

He ran a three-year program of stocking hatchery-raised bass of various sizes in coastal rivers and streams in the northeastern corner of the state that had their bass populations wiped out by Isabel.

It turns out, according to Thomas, that the restocking program was both unsuccessful and unnecessary.

"We sampled last May, and what we discovered was that we've had two good year-classes, in 2004 and 2005," Thomas said. "In the spring, we sample for 1-year-old fish and older, so we don't know about the 2006 spawn yet, but what we know from our study is that we didn't need to stock, because we had some wild fish left over somewhere.

"The '04 year-class appears to be very, very impressive, especially since we'd just had a fish kill the previous fall," he said. "But there must have been a remnant of the wild population that made it through to the spring, and nothing is as valuable as a natural spawn."

Thomas said that biologists believe that enough bass escaped the oxygen-depleted waters that poured down both rivers after Isabel dropped 10 inches or more of rain over much of eastern North Carolina to repopulate enough feeder creeks or different areas of the two main rivers that they will sustain the population indefinitely.

"We had much better spawns in 2004 on the Roanoke and the Chowan than we could have ever expected -- because we expected nothing," Thomas said. "There may have been certain creeks or other areas where some bass made it through, and with very low numbers of adult fish for competition and almost no predation, those two spawns produced a lot of young fish."

Thomas expects fish from the 2004 year-class to be at the 14-inch statewide size minimum this spring. "We anticipate that a good number of those fish will be harvest-sized fish in the spring. The Roanoke and Chowan both look good, but the Roanoke seems like it's a little better," he said. "There were very few fish around to eat the fish that were spawned in '04 and '05, and hopefully, we'll find the 2006 year-class to be good when we sample them again this May."

Thomas said there was little evidence that the fingerling bass the commission has stocked since 2004 have made much of a difference.

"I think the study, which we'll finish this year, will show that we didn't need to stock those fish, because we had wild fish," he said. "For the most part, the study results will show that stocking those 2-inch fish doesn't work in coastal rivers. Our first step next time should be to monitor the population and see what natural reproduction we get in year one and year two after a cyclonic event. If we see after two years that we still don't have any fish, then maybe we need to come in and stock some larger fish, maybe at 8 inches."