Salvation for Laurel Bed Lake

It appears that Laurel Bed Lake is going to be around for a while longer. If you follow this blog, you will remember a post a while back, mentioning the the soon coming demise of Laurel Bed Lake in south west Virginia. Once again, via the Roanoke Times outdoors section comes this headline: "Resurrected Laurel Bed Lake Still Charms."

It appears that due to public out cry, the DNR some how managed to find the $2,000,000 need to repair the dam at Laurel Bed Lake just outside of Saltville, Virginia. It is amazing what the government can find just laying around when given the motivation to look for it. Oh! Look we just happened to find two million dollars stuck behind a filing cabinet! Maybe we can fix that dam.

The only down side is that the lake will remain a smallmouth lake. Back in what some would have considered the glory days, the lake held some rather large brook trout. Today, due to rising water temperatures and some fool stocking rock bass in the lake, no brookies can be found there. Sadly they more than likely will not be found there in the near future either.

If your into smallmouth fishing in a quite and high elevation area you should check out Laurel Bed Lake. There are some regulations on the lake. The first is no gas powered boats, so a john boat or a canoe is ideal for traversing the lake. Also there are some special catch and release rules for the lake, which were suspended during the draining of the lake but have been reinstated.
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Southwest Virginia is Losing Lural Bed Lake

UP DATE : HERE

Lake Lural is a 330 acre impoundment just out side of Saltville, Virginia. It has stood as a tool for flood control for Big Tumbling Creek, which is a pay fishery. Unfortunately, the dam has sprung a leak. Bill Cochren, an outdoor writer with the Roanoke Times, writes -

There are a couple of seepages in the dam of this Department of Game and Inland Fisheries public fishing impoundment, and while they aren’t massive, they also aren’t the kind you can plug with a finger or two.

The fact is -- and get ready for a shock -- it may take as much as $2 million to cover the repairs, according to Gary Martel, DGIF fish division chief.

Sadly, this is not the only lake in the state that has a dam in need of repair. Although, the state says that Lural Bed Lake is a top priority.

I am a native of Southwest Virginia and grew up relatively close to Saltville, but never knew that Lural Bed Lake held trout. Though todays trout numbers are apparently nothing like days gone by.

The trout fishing through the early 1980s was good enough to lure anglers from as far away as the Roanoke Valley. The brookies, some exceeding 3 pounds, took on the dark color of the lake’s water, yet were garnished with bright red specks encased in sky-blue halos.

Ignorance seems to be the reason for the decline of the trout populations in the lake, but I like the way Bill puts it,

For a number of exciting years, Laurel Bed Lake was the place to catch citation brook trout until the fishery began to fall apart. For one thing, some fishermen insisted on illegally releasing rock bass into the lake, fish that competed with the trout and slowed their growth. Compounding that stupidity were problems with high acidity and low oxygen and summertime temperatures that were marginal for brook trout. (Emphasis mine)

I hope that they will be able to restore the lake to what it once was, but for now it looks like by July Lural Bed Lake will be a mud hole.

Matthew