OUTDOORS: GOVERNMENT HELPS STAKE OUT FISH BEDS AT KENTUCKY LAKE

Yarbrough holds up a largemouth bass caught at a stake bed site on Kentucky Lake.

Different anglers have their own favorite fishing situations, but there's a pattern on Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley that you don't hear about just every day.

Some folks like fishing logs, ledges, stumps or bushes. On Kentucky-Barkley, though, an angler might get excited about the prospect of fishing around wheelbarrow handles.

Actually, those wheelbarrow handles on the two western Kentucky impoundments take the form of a much more familiar type of fishing cover: stake beds.

The stake beds in question are public spots, clusters of wooden shafts implanted in shallow flats by Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources crews to serve as fish attractors.

The wood used to make the stakes is a collection of culled ash blanks obtained from a lumber company that produces wheelbarrow handles. Those stout wooden dowels, though they might be sub-par for the controls of a wheelbarrow, seem to serve just fine as enduring shallow-water fish cover.

For those uninitiated to the stake bed as a fishing hole, it's merely a grouping of wooden slats or poles driven into the lake bottom vertically. The shade and object association the stakes afford to fish makes such locations magnets for several species.

KDFWR workers have developed more than 200 stake beds in Kentucky Lake coves from near the Tennessee state line to the extreme northern end of the Lake. On Lake Barkley, there are close to 150 more stake beds established for the fishing public.

"I think it's one of the best things we do," said Terry Yarbrough, principal fisheries technician for the Murray-based KDFWR Fisheries Division First District office. "A lot of people fish them, and there's no telling how many fish they catch out of them."

Yarbrough said electro-shocking surveys have revealed that crappie, bass, catfish, bluegill and shellcrackers all regularly associate themselves with the wads of wood stakes.

Crappie fishing around stake beds tends to be highly productive from late March into May each spring, while bass fishing can be good among the stakes from March until harshly cold weather sets in during late fall.

"We make stake beds mostly for tourist-type fishermen -- they give them obvious places to go fish -- but a lot of local anglers take advantage of them because they hold good fish," Yarbrough said. "I fish them because I've seen how many fish were around them when we've done shocking surveys."

Physically, the typical stake bed is a central, vertical cluster of 5-foot stakes driven into the bottom so that at least 3 feet stick out of the mud. The beds, roughly circular configurations of 6 or 8 feet in diameter, are located in spots where there will be at least 2 feet of water around them during the fall so that fish will continue to use them during the drawdown period.

The central core might contain up to 40 stakes. Around these go perhaps 20 longer stakes that stick farther out of the water and prevent boaters from getting right on top of the shorter stakes.

In the center of it all goes a tall white plastic pipe which rises above the surface like a beacon even when the water is at summer pool it serves as an all-season locator for the stakes when higher water hides the wood.

Yarbrough, a frequent bass angler, likes to probe the stakes with a variety of lures. A devotee of the long-rod, short-line flipping tackle, he can muscle a big fish out of the stakes before it has time to weave the monofilament in a tangle.

When bass are active -- aggressively chasing baitfish -- he may pull a spinnerbait over the stakes or work the edges with a buzzbait or a Zara Spool or Devils' Horse surface plug.

"I'll flip a jig or maybe go to a worm a lot of the time because that's just what I like to do," he said. "But when the minnows are in the stake beds, I believe the bass would hit a corncob.

"I fish deep water ledges some, but I like shallow water fishing better," Yarbrough said. "The stake beds make really good shallow water cover because they hold fish most of the year. And they'll draw some good fish, too -- five- or six-pounders.

"There's some bass in shallow most of the time, and when there's cover in the middle of a flat where there isn't anything else, that's where they're going to go," he said. "We put the stake beds in the flats where there isn't much else but bare mud bottom, so they're going to hold fish."

The state fisheries program of building and maintaining stake beds is an ongoing process. New beds are built occasionally, and old ones are refurbished as time and the elements take a toll. This past winter, one fraught with a good deal of destructive ice cover on the lakes, was particularly hard on existing stake beds and necessitated much fix-up work.

Fisheries workers also have experimented with unique deep-water stake beds -- 12-foot stakes driven into the lake bottom in 16 or so feet of water, an arrangement that leaves the long slats 7 to 8 feet below the surface. The construction requires the use of a specially rigged, hand-held driving tool that lets the stakes be hammered well below the surface.

There are approximately a dozen deep-water stake beds, marked for anglers with floating buoys, on Kentucky Lake. Biologists have yet to determine if they are as effective or more so than standard sunken brush piles as fish attractors.

In the meanwhile, stake beds bristle from the backs of many Kentucky-Barkley bays, obvious locations for anglers to probe for shallow fish. Regular local anglers and visitors alike have learned that there's plenty of action possible for those who'll dip their lures amid a manmade thicket of wheelbarrow handles.

Steve Vantreese is outdoors editor of The Paducah Sun.