Within a few years, anglers on West Virginia's Ohio River should start catching trophy striped bass.

Not the hybrid striped bass that have been stocked there since the 1970s, but honest-to-goodness purebred stripers that can weigh 30 pounds or more.

Since 2008, Division of Natural Resources officials have stocked stripers into the Ohio and a couple of other Mountain State waters. Though the stockings were mainly intended to make up for shortfalls in the hybrid-striper stockings, DNR warm-water fisheries chief Bret Preston said stripers also "have the potential to create a trophy fishery."

"If this works the way we hope it will, the end product could be phenomenal," he added. "Speaking as a fisherman, the opportunity to catch a 20-pound-plus striper would be great."

Hybrid stripers generally run much smaller than that. In fact, the heaviest hybrid ever caught in West Virginia weighed 16 pounds, 12 ounces. By constrast, the heaviest purebred stripers caught in nearby waters - Kentucky's Lake Cumberland and Pennsylvania's Raystown Lake - weighed 58 pounds, 4 ounces and 53 pounds, 12 ounces respectively.

Full-blooded stripers don't usually grow as large in rivers as they do in lakes, but Preston said the Ohio "is easily capable of growing stripers that weigh 20 pounds or more."

Chris O'Bara, a DNR fisheries biologist whose district includes a large chunk of the Ohio, said the river's striper population is growing - partly from stripers stocked downstream in Kentucky and partly from the DNR's stockings.

"We've been finding stripers in the Ohio for the past 10 years, and I'm sure that most of those fish have come from the Kentucky stockings," he said. "Now that we're putting our own stripers in there, I'm sure we'll find more."

DNR officials began obtaining and raising purebred stripers because the supply of hybrids began to dry up.

"Our long-time source for hybrids has been the South Carolina DNR," Preston explained. "Until a couple of years ago, they always had plenty to go around. We obtained them as fry, grew them to fingerling size in our own hatchery system, and then stocked them. A few years ago, the South Carolina folks said they couldn't keep up with the demand.

"We started looking toward commercial sources and other governmental sources, but we found that hybrids would be difficult to get," he said. "Kentucky and Virginia had good supplies of purebred stripers, so we decided to get some and see if we could raise them in our Apple Grove Hatchery.

"We're only a couple of years into this experiment, but it looks like true stripers will be easier to acquire and will give us another open-water big-fish species to make up for the shortfall on the hybrid side."

To comply with the agreement in effect between Ohio River states, the DNR must stock at least five hybrid or purebred striped bass per acre in selected Ohio River pools. The true stripers being obtained from Virginia and Kentucky are allowing agency officials to meet that quota.

Stripers raised at Apple Grove are also being stocked in Summers County's Bluestone Lake and in Grant County's Mount Storm Lake. In both cases, Preston said there were good reasons for putting the fish there.

"Mount Storm is located in the Chesapeake Bay watershed," he explained. "Biologists from the Maryland DNR called us and voiced concern that we were stocking hybrids at Mount Storm. They were worried that the hybrids might somehow contaminate the Chesapeake Bay's purebred striper fishery. They asked us if we would consider stocking only purebred stripers at Mount Storm. We thought that was a reasonable request, so we did it.

"As for Bluestone Lake, it has always had a true-striper population. They migrate down the New River from [Virginia's] Claytor Lake. So we decided to supplement those strays with our own stockings."

Bluestone produced both of West Virginia's striper records - the weight record of 29 pounds, 9 ounces, set in 2000; and the length record of 40 7/8 inches, set in 2007.

Both Preston and O'Bara said it would be a few years before stripers stocked by the DNR in 2008 and 2009 come anywhere close to that size.

Females, which generally grow larger than males, usually reach 17 inches in length by their third or fourth year, and add 2 1/2 to 3 inches a year after that. Though a slow-growing species, stripers can live 30 years or more.

Reach John McCoy at johnmc...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-1231.