.Fish kills in the Shenandoah have been very few this year.  It seems like the kills are hitting the James worse.  Meanwhile, spawning success has been very good the past several years.  My boss, co-chair of the Fish Kill Task Force, convinced me to fish a short section of the South Fork with him yesterday.  We fished from Newport to Alma, only about 3 miles, but we wanted a short trip because of the threat of storms.  I couldn't beleive how many bass we caught.  I easily caught over 100 smallies with the largest being about 16 inches and I caught 6 large mouth ranging in size from 13 - 16 iches.  Just about all my fish were caught on a Zoom Super Fluke rigged weedless with no weight.  I've caught bigger fish in the James, but I've enver caught fish that fast in such a short section.  Don't let the gloom and doom newspaper articles scare you away...the Shenandoah is alive and well!

We fished a 3 mile stretch the week of June 16th and also caught well over 100 fish.  70% smalls and the rest suns.   we did the stretch close to Luray.  Nothing over 14 majority under 11

Goby, the Doah is alive, but still not well.

Is the fishing better than 2004-07? Yes, and there was no major kill this spring. No answer as to why though, though experts I talked to speculat ewe had a more gradual warm up this year in March/April without a sharp temperature spike after a heavy run off event.

The fish are doing their best to replentish the system. The 04-07 spawns have all been off the chart good, so there ARE LOTS of small smallmouths around, if you want 100 8-12 inch fish a day, you can do that.

But the river is not back to what it was in 99-03 when I could routinely expect 100 fish in a day, with 30 of those over 15 inches and 5+ of those 18-20, or bigger.

I floated in July for 3 days at the Shenandoah Riverkeeper Rodeo, along with a dozen of the best smallmouth guides in the mid-Atlantic. Most boats saw several pods of trophy fish, but they were spooky in the clear water. Each float that used to have many honey holes seemed to have one or maybe two concentrations of 3-5 big fish in the best spot, with other preiously prime locations devoid of big fish. The mainstem downstream of Front Royal has more big fish, and the further up the Sout Fork you go towards Port Republic the fewer smallies you will encounter. Some stretches above Luray have almost no smallies to speak of, so some parts of the river are much more severely impacted than others.

The impacts on the upper James this year were worse than on the Doah, and the James from Iron Gate to Snowden is being depopulated like the Doah was in 04-05

The bad news is that there is still no proven cause, though overnutrification because of chicken litter run off is now a working hypothesis of the Fish Kill Task Force. There isn't enough proof for a smoking gun to exist, and the science is so complex there may never be. While that river is trying to recover, there is nothing to stop a return of the kills as the abundant new smallies reach the size where the past kills affected the fish.

Worst, the problem has spread to the James, along with anecdotal evidence of an increase in chicken manure use in that watershed, and I've seen an increase in symptoms on the Rappahannock this summer, though no dead fish. And yes, records that are available indicate that the poultry producers are shipping more free manure into the upper Rappahannock watershed for farm use too.