Kentucky lake bass are resurging, and a bounty awaits
Aquatic vegetation is spreading once more, and that can only accelerate a new fishing heyday developing on Kentucky Lake.
Kentucky Lake, the behemoth reservoir that backs up the lower Tennessee River, is enjoying a bass renaissance.
The TVA impoundment that sprawls southward from Kentucky Dam at Gilbertsville, Ky., is a bass-tournament Mecca, attracting scads of competitive-fishing events for its sheer size (160,000 acres), quality of fishing and abundance of on-shore facilities. It has been the unofficial home of FLW Outdoors, which is based in nearby Benton, Ky., and this year was revisited as a competition stop on the Wal-Mart FLW Tour.
The lake’s recent fishing history is one of extreme abundance followed by moderation, and now it appears that another round of exceptional bass bounty has arrived.
Kentucky Lake and its slightly smaller, canal-linked sister impoundment, Lake Barkley, have traditionally offered productive bass fishing, some of the best in mid-America. Bassing quality went through the roof, however, at the end of the 1980s and into the mid-1990s, after a series of unusually dry years resulted in a proliferation of aquatic vegetation.
Largely the result of clearer water and low flow that gave sunlight penetration a deeper shot at the lake’s bottom, Eurasian water milfoil and naiads took hold and spread over thousands of acres of shallower areas. The grasses created new fish habitat, and black bass responded with large spawns, high survival rates of young and, in a period of time, a golly whopper of a bass population.
By the early ’90s, the lakes were producing dream catches. There was a wild abundance of mature bass. Catches of largemouths averaging more than 4 pounds per bass weren’t unusual. There were periods when the fishing was “on,” during which tournament competitors could average 5 pounds a bass with a limit – and get beaten.
The arrival of wetter years, the vanishing of aquatic weeds and more fluctuation in water levels, however, began to reverse the pendulum swing; great fishing slipped to only good fishing and then slipped even lower through the mid-1990s. As the big-year classes of bass from the drought years grew old and died out, the following classes of fish were much smaller in numbers – and so went the fishing.
After incredibly good fishing, bassing became subpar by Kentucky-Barkley standards in the late 1990s. Twenty-five-pound hauls of bass were replaced sometimes by 7- and 8-pound catches, puny by comparison.
“At one time the bass population was almost three times as large as what you’d normally see,” said Paul Rister, Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources district fisheries biologist. “We were seeing more than 50 pounds of bass per acre in our sampling, and that’s unreal.”
Rister said a return to more “normal” rainfall patterns resulted in less water clarity and more flow – conditions that squeezed out smaller bass spawns – and at the same time doomed the established weedbeds on Kentucky Lake. Restricted light penetration left the sun-dependent growth to wither.
Estimated acres of aquatic vegetation on Kentucky Lake dropped from a high of 7,100 in 1987 down to 3,400 in 1993 before plummeting to a mere 400 acres the next year, Rister said.
After languishing with relatively few acres of grasses through the 1990s, the acreage rose to about 1,500 in 2001 and up to an estimated 2,300 acres last year, he said.
The upturn in vegetation happens to come as the lake’s bass population is already resurging as a result of the more recent, larger spawning classes, he said. The return of the weeds is seen as a positive, although the benefit is muted somewhat because of variety.
“We want the weed growth, but most of what we’re seeing is not the Eurasian water milfoil that we had so much of in the ’80s,” Rister said. “We do have some patches of milfoil and some naiad and coontail, but the biggest part of what we have now is slender-leaf pond weed.
“Pond weed makes a good place for little bass to hide, but it’s dense and doesn’t have that open area inside the beds like milfoil does,” Rister said. “It’s vegetation, and it’s welcome, but it’s not as good a habitat for bass as milfoil.”
Tournament pro Dan Morehead of Paducah, Ky., is a Kentucky-Barkley “local” who has made the bass there work for him. He’s won both FLW Tour and EverStart Series events on his home waters, and he sees them on a clear upswing.
“Yes, the bass population has definitely exploded,” Morehead said. “There’s more bass in the lakes than there has been in 10 years. You can pull up on a ledge and use every worm you have in the boat.
“And, yes, the grass is coming back on Kentucky Lake,” he said. “It can only help, but I don’t attribute the bass population we have now to the weeds. It’s more a matter of getting some better spawning classes after those poorer years.”
Morehead said the dominant vegetation at present, the pond weed, is primarily a shallow-growing variety that is less apt to concentrate mature bass.
“It’s a bank weed. It gives the fry a place to hide, so it helps the bass population, but it’s not a real factor in holding fish – not tournament fish, anyway,” he said. “This grass hasn’t played a role in any tournaments, at least not yet. The milfoil that’s there has been coming on over the last two or three years, so it might grow into something significant if we keep getting the right conditions. We have had some of the clearest water I can remember on Kentucky Lake.”
The bass population has taken great strides without the boost of milfoil that fed the previous boom, Morehead explained.
“There have been a lot of 14-inch-plus bass that are going to be (legal minimum) 15-inch keepers this year,” he said. “And there were lots of 3-pounders two years ago that were fours last year. A lot of those fish should show up as 5-pounders this year.”
A regular in FLW Tour and EverStart Series shoot-outs, Terry Bolton is on his home court at Kentucky and Barkley, and he’s a customary face at the enviable ends of check lines. The Paducah pro is excited about an in-progress resurgence of bass on the lakes as well as future possibilities linked to the latest rise in underwater salad on Kentucky Lake.
“This year, winning catches of five fish weighing 20 to 22 pounds should be more common,” he said. “There’s a lot of fish that were 3 pounds and something last year, and they should help us get back to that 4-pound average.”
The magical 4-pound average for a bass catch isn’t at all too much to ask. It was routine, even lackluster, during the earlier boom years, Bolton recalled. “Back in the early ’90s, you could average 4 pounds in a tournament and not even get a check,” he said. “Back then, you wouldn’t even get the net for a 3-pounder.”
Based on larger numbers of small fish seen in recent times, Bolton expects great things from Kentucky and Barkley over the next few seasons. He also expects aquatic vegetation to help slingshot the population higher.
“Most of the vegetation is pond weed, but there’s a good bit of coontail and some milfoil, and I’ve seen a resurgence in the numbers of fish in those places with coontail and milfoil,” Bolton said. “I fished it (last year), and while I never had a day where I caught a lot of keepers there, I had some days when I caught 40 or 50 bass, and maybe four or five would be keepers.
“There have been some huge schools of bass in the weeds,” he said. “I feel like the fishing ought to double or triple in the areas that have coontail and milfoil. The population of fish in these areas has really exploded.
“I saw lots of fragmented grass (downstream) on the northern end of the lake last year, and that’s how it has to spread,” he said. “It should continue, and we should see a fair amount of grass beds on toward the dam if we keep having fairly normal springs without too much rain.”
Veteran Kentucky Lake tournament angler Ray Barga of Gilbertsville, Ky., hopes the vegetation, particularly the milfoil, continues to spread. He anticipates a fairly stout bass boom, however, even if the weedy stuff never flourishes to the extent of its past glory.
“We already have a strong class of fish that are 13, 14 inches and something,” Barga said. “And we also have, whatever the age class is, a big bunch of fish that were around 3Zv to 3Zx pounds during 2002. That should give us a lot of fish in the 4-pound range this year.
“I’d expect that 22 to 23 pounds is the weight range that it will take to win a lot of tournaments on the lake this year,” he said. “And two or three years down the road, with all the small fish that are there, it should be wild.
“The good part about the weeds that are in the lake now is that we have some for seed,” he said. “There is some milfoil there, and if it continues to grow, it can come on gradually and do some of what it did before. We can view what we have as a good start.”