Looking for a good place to go fishing? Lake Wateree would be a good place to start
Crews will sink more than 5,000 tons of construction material from a spillway project into Lake Wateree -- for sport. Specifically, sport fish like largemouth and striped bass.
The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources announced a fish habitat project with Duke Energy. Duke has significant work ongoing on the Wateree Dam. Part of it will now include creation of four new fish attraction sites and upgrades at two existing ones using 5,200 tons of concrete and other construction material from the job.
The sites are expected to grow bass populations, but also catfish and crappie among other species. Lake Wateree a more than 13,000-acre reservoir on the Catawba River chain. It’s shores span Lancaster, Fairfield and Kershaw counties. Water from Lake Wylie winds through Wateree on its way to the coast.
SCDNR manages Wateree for recreational fishing and has 17 fisth attraction sites there.
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According to the state natural resource agency, the move should leave to more prized game fish.
“As South Carolina’s inland reservoirs have aged, their fish habitat has degraded with the break-down of much of the woody materials left in place as they filled with water,” said Ross Self, SCDNR chief of freshwater fisheries.
The Wateree work is an example of habitat enhancement statewide to address that issue, Self said.
A barge and backhoe will place the concrete at sites of 30- to 70-foot water depths. Work should run through August as spillway sections are dismantled. The sites should both grow and concentrate fish populations by providing areas of cover for spawning.
A year ago, Duke announced the company would drop Wateree beginning in November 2022 to six or seven feet below the lake’s full pond. It would stay at those decades-low levels for more than a year, the company said, as new spillway gates are installed to allow an extra 75,000 gallons of water per second to flow through the dam.
The work initially listed at almost $6 million would improve drought and flood response in the basin as Duke uses reservoirs from Lake James, Lake Norman, Mountain Island Lake, Lake Wylie and others to buffer the full system during extreme weather.
Wateree has 181 miles of shoreline in three counties. It’s not far from Great Falls in Chester County, whether more Duke work brought about the restoration of namesake falls there. Wateree was dammed in 1920 to operate a power station and is the second largest of 11 Catawba chain reservoirs. It’s the largest in South Carolina.
