If you are middle aged like me, you may, occasionally, look back and reminisce about earlier days when you had life’s most precious commodity of all – time.
In my younger days I seemed to have more time to spend travelling around this great commonwealth fishing and hunting all the places I wanted to explore. These days, it’s much more difficult to break free and just go.
I often think about when Briery Creek and then Sandy River Reservoir were opened and fishing each for the first time. I remember fishing Sandy River with a friend some 28 years ago, soon after it was first opened to the public. We were grateful it didn’t have as much flooded timber as found in Briery!
I remember we didn’t catch many bass on that visit, but we did find dozens of small crappie around the dam. It looked like a lake with potential – clear, clean and managed by DWR professionals.
Fast forward almost 29 years ahead to today’s Sandy River Reservoir and you’ll still find a 740-acre lake that is fairly clear with a bit more aquatic vegetation and the same small areas of timber, just not very much above the water.
Over the years the lake went from just a bluegill forage base to now having gizzard shad. Now while that might sound good, it does complicate fishing as the largemouth bass population now enjoy roaming around in open water feasting on the schools of shad.
Located just outside of Farmville in central Virginia, Sandy River was created by Prince Edward County in 1996 and managed by the DWR ever since to provide anglers with trophy bass. For quite some time, Sandy River Reservoir has played second fiddle to its sister Briery Creek, located just down the road. Sandy now offers the same if not better caliber largemouth bass fishery as Briery with far less standing timber to complicate navigation.
As noted above two, small areas of standing timber were left to provide habitat in the lake. Water shield lily pads and some SAV compliment the mix of bass structure.
The lake has a slot limit intended to protect big fish – none between 14-20” may be kept. There is also a 9.9 hp limit on Sandy River Reservoir. You may launch your full-sized bass rig, but you may not use the outboard.
According to DWR statistics, aside from a private pond, Sandy River Reservoir was the best place to land a trophy bass trophy (eight pounds or 22”) in Virginia, producing 23 in 2023.
During our recent early September visit we travelled the nearly two hours from W2 HQ in Louisa to the lake one cool morning and arrived around 8:30 am. The parking lot and ramp are as I remember – well laid out with a good amount of parking and launch ramps on either side of a pier. A canoe/kayak launch had been added since I visited.
My fishing partner for the day would be Sonny Gleason, an accomplished angler that also calls Lake Anna home. He’s a good stick that insisted on fishing from the back of the boat.
We towed the Anna’s Marine Center TRACKER Grizzly 2072 CC equipped with the new Minn Kota Ulterra Quest trolling motor with Humminbird Helix 10 that had side imaging, down imaging mapping and forward facing MEGA Live sonar. We figured the fish didn’t have a chance with my supercomputer equipped new rig.
We had heard from W2 Pro Team member and angler extraordinaire, Ed Hall that the bass were biting well the week prior to our visit so we had visions of 20-pound limits.
When we slipped the Grizzly into the water and headed out the water temperature read 76-77 degrees and there was skein of mist lingering in the upper arms of the lake with an air temperature in the upper 60s.
We started out in front of the dam (you launch near one side of it) where the water was 25’ On the far side there’s some shallower water and rocks in about 4-5’ that the Humminbird showed, and I spotted with my Costas.
Within five minutes Sonny had switched over to his trusty drop shot and Roboworm and set the hook on the first bass of the day. A healthy 13-inch fish was hauled over the gunnale and the skunk was banished quickly.
Soon after I started to notice baitfish on the surface. In fact, they were swirling balls of baitfish which turned out to be gizzard shad, just like what you want to see. I turned the beam of the FFS toward them and scanned the real time screen but all I saw was bait.
When I encounter these conditions on Lake Anna, I’ve had great success lobbing a Tiger Shad tandem-bladed spinnerbait into the bait ball, letting it fall through them and having a bass engulf it before it hits the bottom. This tactic was evidently not in play on Sandy that day.
I stayed on the Minn Kota often using Auto Pilot to stay on a course, pausing briefly with Spot Lock to fish some submerged hydrilla edges, but we had no more bites.
We continued into Marrowbone Creek, under the Rt. 605 bridge where we encountered even more shad balls. Under, these the MEGA Live did show the occasional fish and I made many casts with a Missile Baits Spunk Shad and a Core hook until I finally saw a fish follow my bait, fell the tick of a bite and set the hook on a two-pound bass that bit in 12’ of water under shad.
I have been enjoying learning how to utilize forward facing sonar in my fishing. The technology is amazing! I can now see a lot of fish that I don’t catch!
With scant fish to show for some pretty focused effort, we pushed on into the standing timber maze that lined the Marrowbone Creek channel, Sonny pitching his trusty dropshot and me switching between spinnerbait and a Neko rig, dropping all next to plenty of old trees that had rotted to the waterline.
When Sonny said, “There he is,” and set the hook he was right and landed his second bass: a 12-incher.
We were fishing water four to nine foot deep (nine being in the channel) with trees all around.
It didn’t take long for my fishing partner to claim another bite and I heard him say, “It’s a good one.”
Sure enough Sonny had latched onto a solid Sandy River bass that never jumped and came to the net after a respectable fight. My Berkley scale read 5.13 pounds.
You can guess what I did next – yep, I picked up my own dropshot and began pitching it to those trees. I did catch a small largemouth, but it was Sonny’s day to deliver a clinic.
We fished all the way up that arm. The water here was slightly cooler than the main lake as we approached the actual Marrowbone Creek, and we caught a few more small bass before I looked at my phone and realized the morning had slipped to afternoon and I still had work to do back at Lake Anna.
We had the Grizzly on the trailer by 1:30 and a cold Monster on ice by the time we hit Powhatan to keep the cobwebs back on a warm afternoon drive back to Louisa.
While our day wasn’t great by any means, we did catch a memorable fish and I greatly enjoyed the fellowship of the trip. While the years have come and gone and my hair is white now, I still love to fish places like Sandy River with a friend when I have the time.
I have heard of 30-pound spring limits pulled from Sandy and I have no doubt they are true, but I think the best time for that is late winter/early spring.
I was able to catch up DWR fisheries biologist Hunter Hatcher who manages Sandy River. He told me, “Sandy consistently offers some of the best catch rates for memorable sized fish that we see in our district and region.”
Hatcher attributed that to the watershed around the lake that features “a good amount of agriculture around it.”
“Sandy turns out a lot of 4-7 pound fish. It doesn’t have the giants that Briery does, but it’s a top lake in the state for memorable bass.”
