Photo by Bruce Ingram.

The mood was grim last June 12. I had driven to the Narrow Passage ramp on the James River in Botetourt County and was now aboard an electro-shocking boat with Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries (VDGIF) biologists Scott Smith and Dan Michaelson of the Forest and Farmville offices, respectively.

The two biologists had kindly let me go along to watch as they shocked up smallmouths, rock bass, redbreast sunfish, suckers and other fish as part of their attempt to learn more about, and possibly find out the causes of, the fish kills that had struck the James River Watershed, including the Cowpasture and Jackson rivers, in May.

The fish kills have had a tremendous negative effect on the smallmouth bass populations here.

As Smith maneuvered the craft from the stern, Michaelson employed a long-handled net near the electro-shocking device (a spider-like contraption that hung over the bow next to Michaelson) to scoop up the stunned fish, which he then deposited into livewells in the middle of the johnboat.

Some of the fish appeared perfectly normal, some had lesions that were beginning to heal, and some possessed ugly, open sore-like lesions that had stripped away their scales. Smith ran the boat up and down from the Narrow Passage ramp some half dozen times, stopping after every trip for him and Michaelson to deposit fish in submerged holding cages next to the ramp.

After our final run, VDGIF biologist Steve Reeser and some United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) personnel joined us at the ramp. As Reeser, Smith, Michaelson and I sat in a group, talking in hushed tones, observing the surreal scene of USFS biologist John Coll (gloves on his hands like a surgeon) removing kidney and spleen tissue samples from the fish -- samples that were on their way to a government lab in Pennsylvania -- I was filled with anger about what had happened to one of Virginia’s (and America’s) great smallmouth rivers.

Last May and June, a fish kill struck the James River Watershed, one very similar to the kills that have plagued the Potomac/Shenandoah Watershed since 2002 when a kill hit the South Branch of the Potomac in West Virginia. Reeser, who has had to deal with the kills on the Shenandoah system, had come to lend his assistance to Smith and Michaelson, two of the biologists for the James Watershed.

In 2005, the worst of the kills savaged the South Fork of the Shenandoah, as Reeser and Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) personnel estimated that 80 percent of the smallmouth bass and redbreast sunfish perished.

For the 2007 kill on the James Watershed, Scott Smith estimated that some 10 to 25 percent of the smallmouths had succumbed in the upper James above Lynchburg, with the kill lessening in lethality the closer the river came to Richmond.

The three biologists and I talked about many things as we watched the federal officials do their work, but one thing that Scott Smith said became seared in my memory.

“If the pattern of the fish kills on the James Watershed is similar to that on the Shenandoah, then in the spring of 2008, the James will have a worse fish kill than it did in 2007.”

Obviously, I had much rather write about where to go to catch smallmouth bass in the Old Dominion, but the reality today is that the state that once boasted what many feel, including myself, was the best river smallmouth bass fishery in the United States now has endured kills on four of its six major rivers: the Potomac, Shenandoah, South Fork of the Shenandoah and the James.

Only the New and Rappahannock among the sextet have escaped the devastation.

Nor have smaller rivers escaped: The Cowpasture, Jackson and North Fork of the Shenandoah all have been hit.

So where does the ongoing investigation stand at this writing?