Covington resident Sam Swett used a soft-plastic jerkbait to catch this 6-pound bigmouth at Lake Lery, part of the Caernarvon Project. Photo by Ronell Smith

Full disclosure: I've never caught what could be considered a really large bass. I've been fortunate to bag a buck with a spread bumping 20 inches, and I have the four fans of my wild turkey Grand Slam on my wall. But I've never caught a bass weighing over 7 pounds. Given that Louisiana abounds in big-water bass venues of world-beating quality, it's enough to make a fella wonder -- but not about those big waters, whose considerable merits will be our theme here.

CANEY LAKE
Living as close as I do to fabulous Caney Lake, the home of three state-record bass, you'd think my big-bass production would be higher. It never happened for me during Caney's heyday, when double-digit bass were coming out of the lake on practically a weekly basis.

As a whole, bassers around the state realize that Caney Lake, the 5,000-acre jewel of Jackson Parish, is no longer the big-bass factory of a decade ago. However, if the dream of one fisheries biologist comes true, I still may be able to tie into a wallhanger bass before my chunkin'-and-windin' days are through.

From his headquarters in Monroe, Mike Wood, fisheries biologist manager for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries District 2, oversees Caney Lake. He readily admits that Caney Lake's story is one fraught with intrigue, excitement and disappointment.

"Caney Lake has been the source of a lot of excitement for a bunch of bass fishermen over the years," he said. "This lake has produced three state records and is still the current record holder with a 15.97-pound bass caught a decade ago. In recent years, however, the production of big bass has slowed down."

In order to help me get a handle on what happened to Caney Lake, Wood listed three factors that any lake must have in play if it's to yield up trophy-quality bass with regularity. "It's like a three-legged stool," he said. "Remove one leg and the stool falls.

"The first essential element required to grow big bass is genetics -- you just have to have good genes there. And when you're talking about bass, this means the Florida gene must be predominant.

"The second leg of the stool is age: A bass has to survive long enough to make it to trophy proportions. I'm talking about from hatch to maturity. We have seen significant mortality in Caney Lake bass because of predation due to the lack of cover. The little fish get eaten before they have a chance to grow because there's nowhere for them to hide.

"Thirdly, there must be adequate habitat. When there was plenty of cover on Caney Lake, we saw state records being set and bass weighing over 10 pounds regularly brought to the scales. Once we lost the aquatic vegetation, bass production diminished along with the habitat."

A bit of background for those of you new to the Bayou State bassin' scene: In the early 1990s, Caney Lake developed a serious problem with the runaway proliferation of aquatic vegetation, primarily in the form of the exotic species hydrilla. After several failed attempts to reduce the grass, the decision was made to introduce an exotic animal species to control the hydrilla: sterile triploid carp, more commonly known as "white amur" or "grass carp."

Released into the lake in 1994, the carp did their job efficiently -- arguably, too efficiently. A couple of years after 12,500 grass carp were released into Caney Lake, the hydrilla was essentially gone; so too, however, were native species such as coontail grass. Subsurface plant growth had given bass plentiful habitat in a lake devoid of standing timber, and once that was gone, the fish had no place to hide.