"Things are looking very promising," Kevin Davis said about striper fishing on the Santee Cooper lakes. As co-owner of Blacks Camp on Lake Moultrie, Davis has seen ups and downs in Santee Cooper's striper population, and in the not too distant past he saw far more downs than up. Therefore, he speaks with cautious optimism.

There is good reason for optimism, though. Davis, who is around the camp restaurant and store daily, always talking to fishermen, and who guides on lakes Marion and Moultrie, has heard more about more good striper catches and has seen more quality fish himself in the past year or so than he has in a long time. In addition, he's seeing a lot of smaller fish, which bodes well for the future.

Annual striped bass recruitment varies immensely on the Santee Cooper lakes, and 2008 was an exceptional year class, according to Scott Lamprecht, the fisheries biologist over the lakes for the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. "And those fish are being protected under the new regulations," he pointed out.

New regulations went into effect in 2008 to address issues that were negatively affecting the striped bass fishery. A major objective was to protect female stripers to spawning size. Although the lakes are stocked annually with a target number of 2.4 million fingerling stripers, the contribution of stocked fish vs. naturally spawned fish to the year class varies dramatically from year to year, and naturally spawned fish are important to population stability and to the genetic diversity, according to Lamprecht.

Even looking at the short term, Davis believes the regulations have already had a noteworthy positive impact on the average size of the stripers that anglers are catching.

The regulations cover the entire Santee-Cooper system, which includes more than the lakes, Lamprecht noted. That's important because striped bass are highly migratory and spawn up the Wateree and Congaree rivers and even travel through the locks and fish lift at the other end of the system into the Santee and Cooper rivers. Creel surveys have shown that more than half of the striped bass harvest from the Santee Cooper system occurs upstream of the reservoirs.

Under the new regulations, from Oct. 1 through May 31 the limit is three fish, with a 26-inch minimum size. From June 1 through Sept. 30, no stripers may be possessed, and anglers are encouraged to not target stripers in the lakes during that period because the release mortality is extremely high. The closed harvest season approximates the average time of year when water temperatures in most of the Santee Cooper system get above 70 degrees, which is the point at which catch and release mortality increases substantially.

FINDING & CATCHING THEM
May is a major transition month for stripers in the Santee Cooper system, according to Davis. Early in the month, many of the fish are apt to be high in the headwaters, upriver from Lake Marion in the Santee, Wateree and Congaree rivers. By the end of the month, the same fish might be at the absolute opposite end of the system, in the far lower end of Lake Moultrie. The stripers make spring spawning runs up the rivers, and during the month of May the bulk of the fish return to the lakes and transition into summer areas.