SUNAPEE, N.H. (AP) – When he retired to his house on Lake Sunapee five years ago, Burt Bessey had one idea in mind:

“I thought, oh boy, I’m really going to enjoy some good fishing now,” he recalled after 20 years of good fishing in one of the state’s largest lakes.

But it never happened. Often he came up empty-handed, and when he did catch a fish, it was undersized.

“I’m bewildered, disappointed really,” Bessey, 70, said last week after another day of no nibbles.

He is not alone. Sunapee’s fishing, once among the best in New Hampshire, has fallen on hard times, and no one seems to know why.

Dickie Wright, owner of Dickie’s Bait and Tackle Shop in Newbury, said he has never seen worse conditions in the 53 years of his bait shop.

“Fishing just doesn’t exist here anymore,” he said. “The fishermen have stopped coming.”

Some local anglers say years of excessive environmental restrictions have stripped the lake of the bacteria and algae vital to healthy fish populations.

“It’s a sterile bathtub,” Wright said. “You can’t grow a garden if you don’t fertilize it. And nobody’s fertilizing Sunapee right now.”

Environmentalists and state officials counter by noting the lake’s nutrient levels, naturally low for decades, if not centuries have remained consistent throughout the recent slide in fish quality.

Fish and Game restocks the state’s lakes each spring. In the past couple of years, it has cut back on the number of salmon, hoping the smaller numbers will reduce competition for food among the few salmon that have hung on. But recent statistics are not encouraging, especially compared with other New Hampshire lakes.

Last fall, for example, Lake Winnipesaukee salmon averaged 21.5 inches in length and four pounds in weight. That same season, the average Sunapee salmon measured less than 18 inches and two pounds. Yet as recently as 1994, Sunapee salmon were averaging 20 inches and more than three pounds among the most robust fish in the state.

“It’s a mystery,” said Robert Wood, water quality steward with the Lake Sunapee Protective Association. His organization has gathered exhaustive water quality data, calculated plankton and algae populations, and taken samples of all the lake’s tributaries all with no conclusive results.

“When you put all the information together, nothing really jumps out as the problem,” Wood said. Corey McGrath, 15, thinks the problem is rock bass. This aggressive feeder was introduced to Lake Sunapee about two decades ago.

Since then, the fish has reproduced at a phenomenal rate, devouring the plankton and smelt that would normally sustain healthy salmon and lake trout populations.

“Those fish will eat anything,” McGrath said.

But John Viar, fisheries technician with Fish and Game, said laying all blame on the rock bass is a mistake. Winnipesaukee, Winnisquam and Pleasant lakes also are home to rock bass, and fishing there has not suffered at all.

“Everyone thinks it’s the evil rock bass,” Viar said. “But there had to be the right conditions for the rock bass to take advantage. It’s a much broader problem.”

Any solution to the lake’s woes will require studying all the links in the lake’s food chain from bacteria, to plankton, to smelt; there are no quick solutions, Viar said.

“Nature moves in waves,” he said. “All lakes have their ups and downs; biology isn’t overnight stuff.”

But aside from changing stocking amounts, Fish and Game officials say they lack the resources to carry out long term research on the phenomenon.

AP-ES-07-27-03 1236EDT

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