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Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Trout fishing for bass
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It looked like trout water. Fast-moving, full of rocks and rather cool water and with wader-wearing anglers stepping through it all to get to the fish.
But a trip last week with Chattahoochee River guide Rob Smith (River Through Atlanta Guide Service) was for black bass. The shoal bass, the river cousin of Georgia’s favorite freshwater species, the largemouth bass, is abundant in the Hooch. And with some typical bass lures like spinnerbaits and flukes, the shoalies are pretty easy to catch. Shoalies on the fly can be very productive, too.
The shoalie population from Morgan Falls past U.S. 41 is at an all-time high.
That’s thanks to a five-year stocking program by the state Wildlife Resources Division that aimed to bolster sportfishing in a stretch of river that has become too warm because of development for trout to survive through the summer. There’s still trout - Smith caught a nice brown on a fluke in the Cochran Shoals area on the recent trip - but most of those are fish stocked for the delayed-harvest portion of the river.
The warmer temperatures suit the shoalies, which are common in bigger numbers and sizes in the Flint River in middle and south Georgia.
“I’ve been fishing down here since 1970,” Smith said. “We used to catch them every now and then. We thought they were smallmouths. Now, you can go out there and target them.”
State fisheries biologist Chris Martin says 211,000 fingerling shoal bass were stocked in the river in a five-year program that ended in 2007, and indications are that they are doing well, with fish in the 2-to-3-pound range showing up in electrofishing samplings.
“They’re pretty spread out,” Martin said. “From Cochran Shoals to Thornton Shoals to below Highway 41. And they go further than that.”
The next step is seeing whether the shoal bass is able to reproduce and sustain the population. Martin said samplings this summer will look for fry shoal bass, proof that they’re able to spawn.
On the recent trip, Smith targeted the deeper holes in the Cochran Shoals, catching six or seven bass. At one point, he was getting a strike on almost every cast.
Working the lures aren’t much different than using them on a lake or pond. The big difference is accounting for the river current. But a spinnerbait ripped through the current still drew several strikes on the recent trip.
The brown trout hit the fluke while Smith was casting his way back to the shoreline.
“It seems that every time I go bass fishing, I catch a trout on a bass lure,” said Smith, who also works at the Fish Hawk fly shop in Buckhead. “I want to stay and fish.”
