All three of these lakes on the Warrior have good populations of spotted bass. Photo by John E. Phillips.

During a nippy fall some years ago, my brother, Archie, only wore a lightweight coat and smoked one of his nasty, cheap cigars to force himself to stay awake. He'd worked late and gotten up early to go fishing at the mouth of Lost Creek above the Bankhead Dam on the Warrior River. He fished where the old river ledge and a sunken creek ledge merged out at the middle of the river.

"I was wearing those spotted bass out," Archie recalled. "On just about every cast, I caught spotted bass weighing from 1 1/2 to 4 pounds each, fishing a shad-colored Mann's Little George. As soon as that lead-head spinner hit the water and started to fall, a bass would take it. If I didn't catch a bass on the fall, I'd hop the Little George up off the bottom. Then as it began to fall back, another spotted bass would take it."

However, his fishing partner for the day wasn't hooking anything. Archie finally gave his partner one of his Little George lures. Then, one after another, the two men caught and released spots.

"I was down to my last Little George, and my fishing buddy already had broken off the bait I'd given him," Archie remembered. "This was one of the best days of bass fishing I'd ever had in my entire life."

While battling a 5-pound spot right up to within arm's reach of the boat, just as the bass came within inches of Archie's hand, the 10-pound-test monofilament line touched the fire end of his cheap cigar. The big spot went free.

"I threw that cigar in the water and swore that it would be the last time I'd smoke anything that would cause me to lose a fish," Archie explained.

Particularly if you avoid cheap cigars, the Warrior River lakes in West Alabama can still provide some of that type angling.

Recovered from Pollution
Industry waste, coal mining and municipal dumping once made the Warrior River the poster child for polluted waters in the state of Alabama. Years of abuse nearly strangled the river.

However, thanks to the Clean Water Act passed in 1972, with goals that eliminated releases of high amounts of toxic substances into waterways, the Warrior River made a strong, healthy comeback. Only Holt still suffers from problems relating to surface mining pollution.

"Due to surface mining, some of the tributaries that feed the Holt Lock and Dam almost have been destroyed," Moss explained.

Today, overall, the stream offers superb bass fishing for both spotted and largemouth bass.

Jerry Moss, Division of Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries district fisheries supervisor for the west-central-west Alabama, has sampled Holt and Bankhead reservoirs for more than 27 years, making him the hands-down best authority for fishing information on the Warrior River. Not only has Moss studied the river intensely since his undergraduate days at Auburn University, he also has fished it.