What's happened to bass fishing on the lower James River

Dave Ochs

Seeking answers on the James and Chick

Is there something wrong with the James and Chickahominy Rivers?

Catches of largemouth bass are down, especially on the Chickahominy. But is that part of a normal, historical, cyclical pattern or is there a problem? That's what fisheries biologists are trying to learn.

Bob Greenlee of the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries is the district fisheries biologist responsible for the James River system. Ask him if there is a problem on the James and Chick and he'll tell you, "We don't know."

Dean Fowler is a Fisheries Outreach Specialist in the Williamsburg VDGIF office. He was the biologist responsible for the James before Greenlee. Fowler says “I really haven't had anywhere near as many negative reports on the James bass fishing as I had on the Chickahominy. That's kind of been a little more recent. I'm just getting a few comments trickling through on the James. It's the Chickahominy that seemed to really fall off the table last year, and that's where almost all of the negative comments were coming from."

Tournament fishermen, on the waters frequently, have noticed the change. Russ Shetley, the Region 9 Director of the Virginia B.A.S.S. Federation, says “there has been a decrease in fish catches on the Chick for the past couple of years. It has gotten to the point that we have had folks from the Game Commission attend the state board meetings and report on the results of some of their testing.” Region 4 director Ed Clayton says his personal catches have dropped substantially. Region 2 director Steve Woodruff says he has “attended several tournaments on the Chick in the past two years and the fish catch has had a big drop” in numbers. Sam Robinson, the director of Region 1 in northern Virginia, says he feels “there has been a significant drop in the catch of largemouth bass on the James and the Chick in recent years,” and results of tournaments staged by the regions and their clubs confirm that.

Because of limited budgets and because there weren't any problems, the Department of Game & Inland Fisheries didn't conduct a creel census and an electrofishing survey on tidal freshwaters until a 1994 survey of the Chickahominy. That's the only hard data on which to base any comparison with current conditions. Other than that, there's just anecdotal evidence, stories and questions from fishermen.

It’s a bit like this. If you had never seen them before, and someone handed you a one-pound bag of M-and-Ms to eat, you might think that's a lot of M-and-Ms. Or, you might think that's not much food. Nevertheless, you'd probably enjoy them.

Six years later, if someone handed you a standard single packet of M-and-Ms to eat, you'd probably think that's a pretty small packet compared to the one you had six years earlier. What you wouldn‘t know is that the small, two-ounce packet is a normal serving. The one-pound bag was exceptional.

1994 might have been exceptional. Or, it might have been normal. We don't yet know.

HOW INFORMATION IS GATHERED

Fowler says the state had no quantitative information on fish populations in fresh tidal water in the early 1990s, and he started to gather that information first on the Chick because it's a relatively small river system. That was a matter of selecting typical fish habitats at various locations along the river and then using electrofishing techniques to stun fish to the surface.

There are many different systems for such work. Fowler says his office uses a design which incorporates "the boat hull actually as the negative electrode. Everything in the hull is grounded to the hull, and that's why we don't get shocked when we touch something." In a johnboat, "we'll strip all the paint off the bottom to facilitate the conductivity of the electricity." Two booms are mounted on either side of the boat, usually angled out at 45 degrees in front of boat. The end of the booms look like an umbrella of cables hanging off droppers on either side. Once the generator is running, a pulsator manipulates the electricity to match variable conditions, such as the type of fish being sought, water depth, and so forth. Fowler says the system "creates an electrical field between those droppers and the boat hull itself." Dipnetters on the front of the boat net fish that float up and put them in a livewell while the boat moves along shoreline, nosing into fish-holding areas as extensively as possible.

The electrofishing unit logs the time that it is in operation. Combining that time period with the number of fish shocked renders a fish-per-hour count. Such a count can be used to compare areas within a body of water or different bodies of water over time.

The fish that are netted are measured and weighed, and earstones, a bone in the ear, can be checked for age. The combined length, weight and age reveals the physical condition of the fish. Fowler says those measurements supply statistical data on "whether they're plump or skinny, which can tell us a lot about the population dynamics of what's going on out there, what the food supply is like and so forth." All of those numbers provide the grist for the analysis that takes place later.

THE SEARCH FOR DATA

Greenlee says there's an "intensive effort" under way now to survey both rivers. There have been James River surveys in 1998, 1999, 2000, and this past spring. A spring sampling on the Chickahominy is being followed by planned summer and fall surveys, and the spring check of the James will be backed by another in the fall.

Fowler conducted last fall‘s Chickahominy survey, and Greenlee checked a couple of creeks off the James later in the year. Fowler says there were both differences and similarities in those surveys, but the highlight was that “reproduction was about as poor“ in the James as on the Chickahominy. Fowler says "that would tend to imply that there was probably a weather-related phenomenon and, for whatever reason, the conditions were not conducive to good largemouth bass reproduction last spring or early summer." He adds, "we don't know that it's weather related, but I would tend to think it would be. "

Greenlee says data indicate the "same patterns are holding in the James as in the Chickahominy," which may allow biologists to consider the two rivers together, thus increasing the amount of information available for both systems.

All the bass aren't gone, but comparing the '94 data with recent surveys shows there are fewer of them. Greenlee points out that in "some of the tributaries I saw some really awesome fish. There are places that there are good size fish, not a large number of them. In most tributaries there's not a huge number of fish. The numbers are down from just the little limited data set I have for the James from '98, '99 and 2000"

What Greenlee needs to know is why the population is down. He says, "What we're trying to do is to determine what's going on. Obviously, the numbers are down from '94, but what is the deal? Is it a decline or is it a cyclical thing?"

Greenlee says that in 1998 there was excellent recruitment (survival of the young) in the LM bass population of the Chick and James rivers, and that's what's driving the population now. The fish that are there are from the class of '98 and, to some extent, the class of '99. But he says there's virtually "zero recruitment" surviving from the spawn of 2000. Smaller fish, the 11-to-14 inchers that used to be so common on the Chick, aren‘t being caught because "there aren't any smaller fish in the system."

=========== End of Part One. Part Two Will Appear in August ===========