Coffee and quotes

“……..in the old days anyone with a bucket or a milk can could get a load of fingerling trout and put then wherever he wanted to, and that the first plantings done by the Division of Wildlife itself weren’t much more scientific than that. The result on the one hand was that a lot of already depleted native cutthroat fisheries were destroyed altogether by the introduction of brown, rainbow and brook trout. On the other hand, some thriving fisheries were established where before there had been no fish at all. You can apply revisionist criticism to all that if you

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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

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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

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