Trout Management

[Gavin]

Good eye and Happy B. Day! guess it helps to have young eyes. Looks like one smallie in that net...maybe 14" one of the bigger ones we sampled...the fish in the net are from a very good spot on the lower section of the river...(lack of rainbows), and some very nice fish in there. Norm Crisp & I had a wager on who's favorite hole would shock up better fish...and mine one by a good margin;>).

We measured hundreds of trout on the two days I helped with the sample, plus maybe a 5-6 smallmouth in the 8-15" range, plus one largemouth 17" or so. Its hard work to boot....my back & hands were sore from grabbin fish out of that net & clipping fins all day long.........

The big brown that Jake is holding up was a 23.9" male from the lower stretch..We measured one a little bigger from around Tan Vat...24.3" or so...saw one allot bigger that jumped out of the net. 2006-2007 was a good big fish year..low fish count, but 15% of what we sampled was 18" or bigger..Biggest was a rainbow up by the park, but it was obviosly a stump finned trout park "lunker" that escaped the onslaught.

Humbling experience really. Everywhere you catch fish, and think there is a big fish....There probably is at least one big fish, and probably more than you would ever expect. Cheers.

[Al Agnew]

Never did any electroshocking in the trout water, but I've helped out on a couple of smallmouth streams. We weren't fin-clipping or tagging, just "sampling" the population of game fish. Shock them, scoop them up in the net, dump them into the holding tank, then stop after a bit to count and measure them. I helped shock a section of Big River, and was dismayed at the number of small spotted bass and the lack of smallmouth. But I was also really surprised at the number of rock bass we shocked up. On some streams you catch rock bass regularly while fishing for smallies, but on this stretch of Big River I seldom caught one, and never would have believed there were so many.

We also shocked up a huge flathead catfish that day, at least 30 pounds. As I remember it was somewhere close to 40 inches long.

Another day on Big River, there was something wrong either with the water conditions or the equipment, and we had a hard time getting many fish at all. The biologist told me that sometimes there's something in the combination of water temps and chemistry that makes the electric current not travel so well through the water. It's not a foolproof way of sampling fish populations, but it is really interesting to see what kind of fish come out of places where you've spent a lot of time fishing.