Ashley River headwaters might be key to striped bass' comeback

SUMMERVILLE -- Shultz Lake is a fingernail of deep blackwater where the Cypress Swamp empties into the headwaters of the Ashley River. It might be the last place you'd expect a coastal striped bass to come.

But they used to. As recently as the late 1990s, before the drought years, when late winter rains flooded the narrow lake into the wetland bottoms, striper would school in big spawning runs. The high water or something else that drove the runs also seemed to bring out the other lake species as well, such as sunfish and bowfin. And the lake has at least 28 species of fish.

Shultz would become "some of the best fishing you'd ever seen," said naturalist Jack Kornahrens of The Ponds, a development where the lake is part of a conservancy.

Then the runs quit and the fish virtually disappeared, one more missing piece in the broken puzzle that striped bass has been for anglers, the S.C. Department of Natural Resources and federal wildlife managers.

Now researchers might be about to bring the striper back to the river, where it would be one of those indicator species showing the waters are again healthy enough for other species to thrive. The techniques used could teach biologists what it takes to restore or augment the declining fish population up and down the coast.

The secret to the project's success might just be Shultz Lake.

Refuge

The striper is the big, bottom-dwelling bass that is one of the prize freshwater and brackish water catches of the coast. It is the signature catch of the Marion-Moultrie lakes, the species that drew anglers from across the country until those fish, too, began to disappear in the drought years about a decade ago. After intensive stocking, the fish appears to be on the rebound there.

The striper is found from Florida to Canada and is considered declining in most of its range, a disappearance blamed largely on polluted habitat and overfishing. About the time it began to disappear in the Ashley, the river had become polluted enough that state regulators began tightening restrictions on sewage discharges.

The striper is an anadromous fish: It spends most of its life in the bays and occasionally offshore, but moves upstream to spawn. Upstream in the Ashley could very likely mean Shultz Lake. The fish looks for deepwater holes, "thermal refuges," and there just aren't that many besides the lake in an upstream that occasionally drains to little more than ankle deep in spots.

In 2006, DNR won a federal grant from money paid out by a container ship company fined for dumping waste oil in Charleston Harbor. Biologists launched a research project stocking hatchery-raised stripers into the lower Ashley, historic striper territory, where they were now counting only one or two fish per survey. They hoped to come up with techniques good enough to restore or enhance the population up and down the coast.

They stocked fingerlings and failed miserably; they stocked bigger juveniles and did only somewhat better. Looking for an answer, they moved the stocking upstream, to the Jessen Boat Landing in Summerville, a little more than five miles from the lake.

Offspring

It shouldn't be any surprise that Shultz Lake could end up on the cutting edge of the striper restoration. It's been on the edge of a lot of Lowcountry history.

In the 1700s during the Yemassee War, a Colonial militia led by Capt. George Chicken fought off a band of Indian marauders from a mud fort at the lake. Just upstream in the swamp is Big Island, a 5-acre bluff reputed to be have been one of the hideaways of patriot raiders such as Francis "Swamp Fox" Marion during the Revolutionary War.

The lake and the river are public, but are surrounded by private property. Getting there by water is a boat haul over logs. So Shultz became one of those deep woods, "sneak" fishing camps for generations of Summerville youth. It was a hideaway where the catch was so plentiful they could smack the water with a rod, stun the fish and net it.

DNR stocked its first striper at the Jessen landing in 2009. The next year, the young striped bass began turning up in Shultz Lake. Now, The Ponds residents who fish the lake say they are starting to hook striper, even though they are still not keeper size.

During the 2010 surveys, biologists also pulled in non-stocked juvenile stripers from the river -- fish that may well be offspring.

"That's really exciting. There's something going on. We have a little more hope for the project," said Tanya Darden, DNR research scientist who is doing the genetics work to determine where and when the stocked bass move.

The next round of research gets more interesting. In early summer, biologists equipped five adult, hatchery-raised striped bass with acoustic transmitters and set them loose at various points along the plantation stretch farther down the Ashley. Receivers have been strung at spots along the river that include one at Shultz Lake.

This winter, if that receiver gets a ping, it would be big time evidence that the striped bass are going upstream to spawn in the lake.

"We'll see what happens," Darden said.

Reach Bo Petersen at 937-5744 or follow him on Twitter at @bopete.