Thousands of largemouth bass, crappie fingerlings added to reservoir
Michael A. Sawyers
Cumberland Times-News
BLOOMINGTON — The Maryland Fisheries Service dumped 12,000 largemouth bass fingerlings and 18,000 black crappie fingerlings into Savage River Reservoir Tuesday in a continuing effort to return game fish to the impoundment that was drained this past winter.
Dave Sein, who works at the Manning Hatchery in Brandywine, drove the fish from Prince George’s County to their new Garrett County home. It wasn’t the first trip.
“We had already stocked 800,000 walleye fry and 25,000 walleye fingerlings along with 25,000 bluegill fingerlings, 9,000 red-ear sunfish fingerlings and 3,850 adult rainbow trout,” Alan Klotz, regional fishery biologist, said Tuesday.
“We will be stocking fingerling warm water fish for the next three years to replenish the fishing in the reservoir,” Klotz added.
Klotz said anglers should not expect much in the way of fishing for the warm water species for a few years. “But once the fish start growing, the fishing will come back quickly, usually peaking about five years after stocking in reservoirs that have been drained. The trout, though, are ready for catching right now.”
The reservoir has returned to full pool, having been drained so that repairs could be made to faulty release gates in the dam.
Klotz said he was surprised that dead fish from the reservoir were not found downstream in the Savage River.
“I expected to find thousands,” he said. “I think they must have washed on down into the North Branch (of the Potomac). We certainly didn’t see dead fish lying on the drained reservoir surface.”
In addition, Klotz said some yellow perch, largemouth bass and smallmouth bass moved upstream in the Savage River during drainage and have likely returned to the impoundment.
Klotz said that initial news about survival of trout downstream of the reservoir is good.
“We had a crew do a quick electrofishing sample and found adult brown and brook trout just about everywhere,” he said. “We probably lost a year of reproduction, but the adult fish seem to have done better than anticipated. When I watched the high flows coming down the river during the draining I didn’t think any trout would survive.”
Klotz said a thorough survey of the lower Savage River will take place in July and will tell the full post-drainage story.
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