Means fair or foul
Breeding season for us ‘week-end hatchery guys’, brings on some peculiar behaviour. We go fishing with toolboxes, brush-cutters, wire cages, cleaning equipment, poles, thermometers and the like. And on many trips we don’t get to fish at all. But we still have a lot of fun.
While we catch most of our brood fish fairly, and on fly, it is silently acknowledged that to trap them is equally honourable. This requires a good fish trap in the feeder stream.
Fish trap building:
Adjusting stocking rate for size of Trout
Stocking Trout is such a fickle thing.
If one researches the stocking rates recommended on the internet, as I have done, the answers are as varied as the size of the flies in your fly box.
Generally one stocks more if you are putting in little fish (fry to perhaps 3 inches), and fewer if you are stocking larger ones (say above 5 inches). This rate of stocking for different sizes is of course on a continuum from “fry” (being something that has only just absorbed its yolk sac) to fish of 10 inches or so.
By this we take it that larger fish have a higher survival rate. This assumption should possibly be questioned, or at least explored in more detail.
Hatchery ponderings
I lay in bed this morning, as the rain pattered on the roof, thinking as one does, about exactly where to spread our “winnings”. We have all, I am sure day- dreamed about how exactly we would spend our lottery winnings. A new truck, a couple of bamboo fly rods, a few trips to exotic fly-fishing locations reachable only by helicopter: Kamkatchka. New Zealand. Alaska. Maybe Mongolia for Taimen. That sort of thing. But our winnings this time are real winnings. They are Trout. Hatched Trout, and thousands of them.
Thousands of them!
We had a good year at the hatchery this year you see, and we have a last batch of some twenty odd thousand fry, that need to go into the dams tomorrow.
