Posted by Warren Turner on April 28, 2009 at 12:38:07:
Folks,
We have been making progress in our long standing proposal to establish Lake Russell as a trophy striped bass fishery. We now have a champion in the SC House willing to sponsor the proposal.
Representative Jeff Duncan is Chairman of the Agriculture, Natural Resources & Environmental Affairs Committee of the SC House, and has taken up our cause. Next week he will introduce an ammendment ot House Bill H3913 to add our proposal. Here is the letter I wrote to him after our discussion.
Lets keep our fingers crossed.
Warren
Representative Jeff Duncan,
I enjoyed talking to you this morning concerning modifying H3913 to include making Lake Russell a Trophy Striped Bass Fishery. Thank you so much for becoming our champion in establishing a trophy striped bass fishery for SC citizens and visitors to our great striped bass fisheries. South Carolina has a great striped bass fishery (Santee, Murray, Thurmond, Hartwell, Wateree, Greenwood, and several river striped bass fisheries) available to everyone within a short drive from their homes. Proof of this comes from the fact that our SC state record for striped bass has come from several lakes (Santee, Thurmond, Hartwell, and Russell). However, we are missing a great opportunity by not having a striped bass fishery established and managed as a trophy striped bass fishery. Lake Russell provides us a unique opportunity to establish one fishery in our state that could be managed as a trophy striped bass fishery.
Here is the proposal that I believe will be well received by users of the Lake Russell fishery on both sides of the Lake.
• In Lake Russell, including the Lake Proper from the Richard B. Russell Dam forward to the base of the Lake Hartwell and Lake Succession Dams and all other tributaries leading into the
I am all for making Russell a trophy fishery. My biggest concern is summer stress mortality on released fish. What kind of water temps do you see in August?
That is the part I do not understand how you handle it.
Doesn’t Murray have a size limit and during the summer there is some type of exception to the rule for one fish.
I do a lot of downrigger and leadcore line fishing in the late summer and it is about the only time I keep any fish. They come up from deep and are bloated, we have tried venting a few and that seems to work but not sure of the long term life span when you do this.
It would be nice to see a tagging program to study these fish and see if they survive venting and being pulled up from deep cool water to very warm water on the surface
i think they should implement a slot system on hartwell…
I really wish they would do something like that on Hartwell, I would like to see Hartwell turned into a trophy lake since it is recommended to not eat fish out of Hartwell it looks to me like that would be a obvious choice
In reference to summer mortality of released stripers…Warren Turner’s group funded a mortality study of released striped bass on Murray. The purpose was to examine the benefits of using the tuna tubes to hold tournament caught stripers so that they could be released alive. This is a published study (author Jason Bettinger), a copy of which can be tracked down. The bottomline of this study, which reinforced previous work, was that summer time angling and handling results in a very high rate of mortality of released fish (greater than 21")…somewhere in the range of 65 - 85%. Even in Russell, the best bet is to leave them alone during the heat of the summer ~ June thru early October. “Opening Day” should something to look forward too.
Like everyone else has pointed out, Russell is ideal because you have near by fisheries that should satisfy folks that don’t target trophys.
I think the size limit on Murray is messed up in the summer months. I think you should be allowed to keep the small fish and no big uns. I couldn’t tell you how many times I have been fishing the towers in the summer and seen 40 or 50 shorts floating. I never see the bigs floating its always shorts.
Steve
Why do today What you can put off til tommorrow to go FISHING!
Devildog1’s observations emphasizes the point that length limits don’t work in the heat of the summer…it is alos unlikely that we can relying on human nature to stop fishing after you have reached a numbers limit. If the fish are biting, even though I know I am going to needlessly keep killing fish, it is hard to stop. Where trophies are the management goal, summer closure makes sence. Where it is not important, then perhaps no summer length limit might be a better idea.
Is it just me or is the reason Develdog is not seeing big fish floating is because no one releases them?
I do agree with the summer time fish kill but trust me when I say there are places to catch stripers in July and August on Russell where the water is cold enough to use freelines and release the fish unharmed. In fact we never keep the larger fish we catch in this area
If the temperature of the water is <70 F and taken in less than 20’ of water, survival should be good. I don’t know Russell very well and don’t know how the lake stratifies and how deep fish are normally taken in the summer. Isn’t there going to be some kind of Oxygen injection system installed there soon? This will creat a warm weather (summer time) concentration area, which may create some additional situations that may need to be addressed.
There is an O2 system there, in the summer on the main part of the lake right at dam you can see all the bubble coming up, the lines kind of cross the lake at an angle(will black out your FF). Never thought about it but that may help their survival
I can’t quite understand how you could have a slot limit work when the big ones have such a high mortality rate when released. What might make sense is to stock with hybrids and stripers, and only allow hybrids to be kept for a period of years to be determined by biologists, however many years it takes for a fingerling striper to become a 20 pound striper. Then change the regs to allow one striper in a slot per man per day, and again, all the hybrids you can catch. You wouldn’t necessarily have a whole bunch of 40 pounders, but you’d have alot in the 20-30 pound range with some 40-50 in the mix.
T & S,
The warm weather catch and release issue sure makes any length limit problematic, but even big fish can be caught and released successfully during cooler times of the year.