The Avid Angler: The Oconee River Page

Surprise Discovery at Commissioner's Creek

On August 8, 1991, Jimmy Evans, a fisheries specialist with the Georgia DNR, was hard at work electroshocking the waters of the Oconee River. He was preparing a survey of fish populations for a Georgia Power federal relicensing application. That afternoon he worked his way downriver without incident -- until he reached the mouth of Commissioner's Creek in Wilkinson County. Near the creek mouth, something unexpected happened. As he pulsed the electric current through the rods hanging from the front of the boat, several extremely large red-scaled sucker fish floated to the top. He netted the fish and took a closer look. The fish had thick robust bodies and rosy-colored fins. With an average weight over nine pounds, these red monsters were much larger than any sucker fish he knew of. Little did Evans know that he had just rediscovered a colony of fish lost to science since 1869

Once back on land, and curious for a precise identification, Evans shipped several specimens to Bud Freeman and Robert Jenkins, noted icthyologists at the University of Georgia and Virginia's Salem College. The scientists knew they was seeing something strange; at first, even they were unable to identify the fish. Over the next two years, these and other scientists collabarated with the Georgia DNR to finally unravel the mystery of the red-scaled catostomids.

These large sucker fish were actually robust redhorse fish -- and they had last been identified in 1869 -- over 120 years ago. Their range once spread from the Pee Dee River in North Carolina to the Altamaha River in south Georgia, but now their population seemed confined to a small creek mouth on the Oconee River between Dublin and Milledgeville, Georgia. Read the Full Article here, including a first-hand account of this spring's collection and breeding of redhorse from the Oconee River in Laurens County, Georgia.

Last Monday evening, Santiago and I went fishing for bass on the Oconee River. The fishing wasn't succesful (see details below) but significantly, we did see discharges again from the City of Dublin's wastewater treatment facility. We put in at the Brickyard Landing in East Dublin around 5:30 and cruised upriver close to the Highway 80 bridge, and floated back down, casting to the banks. When we reached "Soap Creek" -- the creek the sewage plant's pipe drains into -- we saw the namesake white soapy foam cakes floating into the river, a sight that last year was so common, but which I hadn't witnessed recently. Several of the soap cakes were about a yard in diameter, surrounded by numerous smaller ones. . . Read the full story here.