The days of anglers pulling 20-pound chinook salmon from Lake Sakakawea are long past, but the fish appear to be bouncing back as water levels rebound in the drought-depleted reservoir.

This summer, "fish turned up in that 12-13 pound range," said Dave Fryda, a fisheries biologist with the state Game and Fish Department. "It's the first time we've seen 12-pound 'whopper' size fish in a number of years."

Years of drought in the Missouri River basin caused the lake to drop to record-low levels where cold water at the bottom began to disappear. Deep cold water is prime habitat for rainbow smelt, the primary forage for such fish as salmon and walleye, another Sakakawea staple.

In recent years, the average size of a Sakakawea salmon has dwindled to about 5 pounds, said Kirby Morgenstern, a guide who has fished the lake for nearly four decades.

"It kind of goes with the water - when that goes down, everything else goes down, too," he said.

That included Morgenstern's customers. In recent years, "I had guys booked, but I told them what the fishing was like, gave them an option, and they elected not to come up then," he said.

The U.S Army Corps of Engineers says Sakakawea is about 11 feet higher than last year at this time, boosting the general health of the Sakakawea fishery. The big lake still is about 11 feet below normal.

The larger salmon being caught by anglers this summer likely are due to a healthier population of cisco, another forage fish, Fryda said.

"Sakakawea definitely gained a lot of water, but the water came late in June," he said. "The critical smelt spawning is late April, and the reservoir actually dropped. We had some eggs high and dry."

However, the higher lake level "is setting us up good for next year," Fryda said. "2009 has the potential to be a big turnaround year, if things play out right."

Greg Power, the Game and Fish Department's fisheries chief, said that if the lake continues to rise, the department might start increasing salmon stocking levels in a couple of years.

The fish can't naturally reproduce in the lake, so wildlife officials collect eggs and transport them to the Garrison Dam National Fish Hatchery, where they are raised for stocking. The stocking rates depend on the forage base, and in recent years only about 50,000 salmon have been stocked per year in Sakakawea.

"When times were good, we were somewhere near half a million," Power said.

Morgenstern remembers those good times.

"In the early '80s, we used to go out and catch big fish and no little fish," he said. "We'd never have a fish under 6 pounds.

"The last few years were tough," Morgenstern said. "This year was a little easier."

Fryda said biologists won't know until eggs are collected later in the fall whether salmon numbers are increasing along with their size. Based on angler reports, he said, fishing was good earlier in the summer but has dropped off lately.

"We know the quality has improved substantially over the last few years, but the quantity we won't know until that spawning run," Fryda said.

Power said that overall, the Sakakawea salmon fishery is "the best it's been for a number of years."

"We're nothing where we want to be, where we were, but things have improved somewhat," he said.

"The last couple of years, when that water level went down, our fishing declined," Morgenstern said. "This year helped a lot. (The lake) came up about a third of what it was down. It's a step in the right direction, anyway."