Fishermen who are interested in keeping a limit of spotted bass for the table and fish a number of Upstate lakes may find it useful to carry a scorecard to keep up with what’s legal to keep based on what body of water you’re on.
When the state overhauled its freshwater fishing regulations in 2010, the idea was to try to protect largemouth and smallmouth bass stocks by increasing size limits and reducing creel limits. A limit of five bass in aggregate was acceptable to catch-and-release anglers because tournaments only allow five fish anyway.
Complications arose when trying to target spotted bass for population reductions. Some impoundments had few if any spotted bass. Other lakes — Keowee, Hartwell and Russell — were full of them. Add to it the reciprocal agreements with Georgia that requried uniformity in the laws, and some anglers were opposed to toting slide-rules or calculators to the lake.
“On the Savannah lakes, it remained at 10 black bass in aggregate,” said biologist Dan Rankin of the SCDNR. “You can keep either 10 largemouth or 10 spotted bass or any combination up to 10. South Carolina wanted to change that on the Savannah lakes to reduce largemouth to five but keep 15 spotted bass. That’s what we did on the other lakes, especially lakes where we don’t have an established spotted bass population.
“But when we went to these public hearing and meetings with the Georgia DNR, there was a lot of resistance. They did not want to change their black bass for the sake of consistency, and there may have been a concern with anglers not being able to distinguish between the two species in some cases. In any event, we left that alone on the border waters of the Savannah lakes.”
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