Five units, 18,000 cfs and a 700 cfs floor
Dominion Energy's Saluda Hydro at Dreher Shoals Dam, the Lake Murray dam, has five Francis units. Units 1 through 4 pass 3,000 cfs each at full gate and draw from about 175 feet down; Unit 5 passes 6,000 and draws from 55 feet, which is why the river is coldest when the big unit is off. Together that is 18,000 cfs, and the gauges touched 17,900 during Helene in September 2024. Historically the river got as little as 180 cfs between peaks. Since the 2009 relicensing settlement Dominion has operated to that agreement's minimums even though the new FERC license was still pending in the last public update: 700 cfs from January through March and June through December, striped bass spawning flows from April 1 to May 10, and 1,000 cfs from May 11 to May 31, with a stated operating range of 500 to 700 cfs at minimum. Dominion's Lower Saluda page shows the day's flow as a color, blue for low through red for high, sends text and email alerts, and its warning is that the sirens and strobes where they exist mean a rise within minutes.
What the gauge near Columbia reads
USGS 02169000 sits near the I-26 crossing at the Riverbanks Zoo end of the river, two and a half miles below the dam gauge at 02168504 and about 40 cfs higher from tributary inflow. In September 2026 it read 790 to 870 cfs on the low days, stepped to 1,200 to 1,390 cfs when a unit ran through the afternoon and evening, and never went higher. Over the last year the daily mean has run from 587 to 7,470 cfs with a median of 876, and the monthly means peak at 3,500 to 3,750 cfs in December and January. PaddleSC lists 700 cfs as the minimum for a safe paddle, and the guide consensus is that the river wades with care up to about 800 and fishes from a boat well above that; the 500 to 1,000 cfs band on this page covers the at-rest river and one unit at minimum gate, and anything over 2,000 means the plant is generating in earnest.
I-20 to Stacey's Ledge: the catch-and-release nursery
In 2014 SCDNR biologists found holdover trout reproducing between Saluda Shoals Park and the zoo, with young-of-the-year surviving. The legislature responded in 2018 with Act 207: the lower reach from the eastbound I-20 bridge downstream to Stacey's Ledge, about two and a half miles, is catch-and-release for all trout year-round, with no tackle restriction, so bait is legal but every trout goes back. The act carried a June 30, 2025 sunset, yet SCDNR's 2026 to 2027 regulations guide, effective August 14, 2026, still lists the zone, so fish it as current and ask the agency if you want the statutory footnote. On the rest of the lower reach, from the Broad River confluence up to the dam, the limit is five trout a day of which only one may be longer than 16 inches, a rule in place since 2013, with no bait or tackle restriction. South Carolina has no trout stamp; a freshwater license is $10 a year for residents and $35 for nonresidents, or $10 for a nonresident day.
Stripers from mid-April, and the June 16 closure
Stripers from the Santee Cooper lakes run up the Congaree in spring to spawn and then push into the lower Saluda to sit in the cold water all summer. Saluda Valley Guides' Jake Howard says they show at the Saluda-Congaree junction around April and are in the river from late May to early September, most of them ten to twenty pounds. The lower Saluda is inside the Santee River system for regulatory purposes, and those rules are specific. From October 1 to June 15 the limit is three fish between 23 and 25 inches, except that one may be over 26. From June 16 through September 30 striper harvest is closed everywhere in the system, and only the lower reach of the Saluda allows catch-and-release fishing for them during the closure, with a condition added in 2024: if you fish live or dead bait, the hook gap may not exceed three-eighths of an inch, or you use an inline, non-offset, non-stainless circle hook of any size. Fly South's Johnny Butler, who has sold fly tackle from his Columbia home since 1996, posts striper reports through September.
December stocking, and the fall problem
SCDNR stocks close to 30,000 rainbow and brown trout, eight to eleven inches from the Walhalla hatchery, into the lower Saluda from December through February, and the Congaree Riverkeeper puts the mix at roughly three-quarters browns. It is a put, grow and take fishery: the 2020 SEAFWA study by Ahle and Bettinger measured annual mortality above 95 percent and a harvest rate under nine percent, but growth over 17 millimeters a month, brown trout to seven pounds, and catch rates that peaked in December right after stocking. USGS temperature at the dam gauge averages about 50 degrees in February, 57 in May, 61 in August, and, because the lake turns over, 63 to 64 in October and November, which is the warm, low-oxygen stretch the study calls seasonally hypoxic. Spring is the trout window, when Howard says the fish move into the shoals for oxygen and feed best between 50 and 60 degrees.
Hope Ferry, Saluda Shoals, Gardendale and the Millrace portage
Two trailer ramps serve the whole river: Hope Ferry Landing on the Lexington County bank off Corley Mill Road and Saluda Shoals Park on the Irmo side, 5605 Bush River Road or 6071 St. Andrews Road, $7 a car; the park closes at 5 p.m. in winter and 8 p.m. in summer. Gardendale, three and a half miles down on the north bank off Garden Valley Road near I-20, is Dominion's carry-in access and the top of the catch-and-release zone. Below I-26 the rapids start: Ocean Boulevard, then Millrace, a dynamited old dam with rebar that SCDNR says to portage on the left using the Saluda Riverwalk, then Stacey's Ledge, Shandon and Pop Up Hole before the takeouts below the Gervais Street bridge at Senate Street and the West Columbia amphitheater, ten miles from Hope Ferry. The Riverwalk, opened in 2020, runs three miles of the north bank from I-26 past the zoo to the Broad confluence, entered from Candi Lane off Greystone Boulevard; the zoo no longer allows river access from its lots.
Olives, caddis and the shad pattern
Howard describes a spread of mayflies from small olives to larger pale duns, with most fish taken on Hare's Ears, Pheasant Tails and caddis pupae and an Adams for the rises; for stripers it is a shad imitation in white or chartreuse, black when the river is muddy. No entomological survey of the lower Saluda has been published, so the calendar below is the guides' and a starting point.