Photo courtesy of Rich Owen.

Depending on how you interpret the data, 2008 could be a really good year or a really bad year for bass fishing at your favorite lakes.

On the one hand, we can celebrate the fact that our seemingly eternal drought finally ended last spring. Water levels stayed high throughout the state all summer long, creating excellent reproduction and recruitment conditions. Bass should have spawned well at most lakes, and the extended high water period provided sufficient cover to help young bass survive into the fall.

Those fish should comprise an excellent year-class, but anglers won’t notice a bump for at least two or three years, when those fish finally grow to sizes that anglers want to catch.

On the other hand, the drought really hurt bass reproduction and recruitment for several years previous, so there’s a big gap in high-quality year-classes. The exception is at lakes where water levels were stable, such as Lake Arbuckle. We have plenty of young bass in our lakes this year, and we have a pretty good crop of big bass from years past, but not much in between.

Gene Gilliland, bass biologist for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation, said you have to look at trends to determine the quality of a bass fishery. Electrofishing data provide a snapshot of a fishery at a given time, but overall trends reflect the condition of the fishery at large.

“The total catch rate alone is not indicative of total quality of a fishery,” Gilliland said. “The size of bass, the percentage of fish over 14 inches, may actually be a better indicator of what most bass anglers would consider quality fishing. If you want to take a kid fishing, lakes with extremely high catch-rates are ideal, but when somebody looks at big numbers, 180 or 200-something bass an hour, that very often can be a little misleading. They really need to read the whole story.”

American Horse Lake is a perfect example. The ODWC originally managed it as a trophy bluegill lake. The bass pop-

ulation was managed for numbers so they would eat small bluegills while the remaining bluegills grew huge. Now, there are too many bass, and because they eat all the bluegills, there’s virtually no bluegill recruitment.

During electro-fish sampling in the spring of 2007, ODWC personnel caught 233 bass per hour, but 99 percent weren’t even 12 inches long.

“They did catch a 10-pounder there,” Gilliland recalled. “They’re obviously eating other bass, and that’s what’s keeping those fish going.”

To remedy situations like that, Gilliland said, it’s imperative for anglers to keep and eat little bass. And not just a few here and there, but a lot, and often.

“Nobody keeps bass anymore,” he said wistfully. “We can’t get anyone to keep them. On a lot of these lakes, the lack of harvest has really taken a management tool away from us to keep things in balance.”