S.Coast Coaster decision delayed

Agency delays decision on coaster brook trout
by The Associated Press
Saturday December 06, 2008, 10:42 AM

MARQUETTE, Mich. - The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has delayed a decision on whether to place the coaster brook trout on the endangered species list.

The agency had planned to make a tentative decision by Dec. 15 about the fish, which once thrived in the upper Great Lakes.

But Jessica Hogrefe, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife regional office in Minneapolis, tells The Mining Journal of Marquette for a Saturday story the agency is pushing back the decision until April to get more data.

"Coasters" are a type of brook trout that migrate from streams to lakes. Their historical range took in parts of Lakes Huron, Michigan and Superior, with spawning runs in more than 50 streams flowing into Lake Superior from Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin.

August Ties followup

looks aside ...





the ugly flies do work ...

Austria - yes that's right Austria

Report posted July 31 - but fished in Austria June26/27...

Burned a ton of miles and decided to get the kids some Old Europe culture.

This was the Fishing Hutte we spent a night in.
outside:

inside:

The back yard of the utte:


We hiked up the side of the valley to get a close look at one of the waterfalls coming down from the ice fields.





This valley is above the Krimml wasser falle - highest in Europe.

The kids at the top of the valley.



and there was trout:




The Krimml Achental is 14KM long, ending in a glacier at the head of the valley that is coming down off of Großglockner the highest montain in Austria. ( I think ). The fishing access is all controlled by the Braurup Hotel family, apparently they have been contolling it for the last 400 years or so. They issue daily permits to the 200KM of prime waters that they control, at 25 euros a day. The 14KM of the Krimml above the falls is in a preserve, that limits the rods to 10 a day, fly only, complete C&R. There were two other fisherman there for the two days I was there, I did not see them any near I was fishing, but I ran into them in one of the two "restaurants" that are up there. Basically old alpine farmhouses and the families that live in them sell beer, and homemade weinerschnitzel and milk and cheese made from the 8 or 9 cows they graze, and have on the farm, and I swear that the cream and cheese soup tasted like the wildflowers they were grazing on.



It was blazing sun while we were there with occasional rainclouds blowing through. So - by midmorning the river itself would be up in high runoff mode. I couldn't cross the river to get to this pool and big back eddy, but some monster trout were steadily rising to a grey and sulfer hatch beyond my ability to cast and mend and float a dry into this. These trout laughed and mocked me all afternoon.



The high water did bring up all the small feeders flowing in from all the waterfalls though and the trout did take refuge in these.



These were fishes that came from these feeders on dries of various types.
















The second day in the evening I fished a different stream. Thom the guide at the shop at the Braurup sent me to it. I don't know what it was called. It looked like this.



Got a few from this stream - including the biggest fish of my two Austrian fishing days.



Had one on this stream at the base of a plunge pool that I never saw. It just broke me off after about 30 seconds.

Hard rains gonna fall

June 8

Some things I thought I was gonna do didn't happen, others fell into place in a vague way. A bit of a window opened for take off Sat morning and the radar looked mostly not good. A single line of storms on sw to ne diagonal was looking to cross the driftless and so I figured I'd gamble on coulee hopping keeping an eye on the thunder heads and headed off for a June fish on the spring creeks. In the car at 11AM had me on the first stream at 2:30PM. I figured I'd play to hit the headwaters and watch the radar on the phone and jump the ridges looking for clear water to try to avoid being struck by lightning.

I knew that there was some H.I. bank work happening on the first spot on a largish drainage south of the sconny river, but apparently dropped in right at the top of the work. This is what spring creek bank restoration looks like when it is just a couple of weeks old.


This spot used to look very different.

Although very natural looking, in 2005 when this pic was taken it had had extensive brushing the previous season, including placing that log. The new bank work looks pretty raw. I could always get a brook trout or two from this spot - and apparently still could.
This is a brown from the next pool upstream.
Tucked into the bank and waited out the rain from an isolated thunderhead. The lightning wasn't too close.
15 minutes later 90 degrees and 100% humidity on cold spring water.


Another nicer brook trout amongst many.

Here's my June submission for the Calendar fundraiser. This is bank work that is one year old.

Another thunderhead rolled in from the south and I followed it up and over the sconny river to fish a different stream. Stopped to set up the tent, at the highest point on a little county campground, next to a dandy spring and hopped a ridge to another stream.

There was fish.



A little after 7PM the steady wind from the south stopped, and it was all perfectly still, and hot, sticky, and the sulfers started popping off the surface, and a cloud wall came bearing down the valley at about 50 miles an hour - from the north. After all this regular summer storms from the south - this had bad news written all over it. I didn't make it back to the car before the driving rain hit.
I made it back to the tent, had a couple of cheese snadwiches and drank the majority of the pilsner 6-pack and settled in with the lightning overhead and the first glo bugs of the season blinking down below and rain pounding on the tent.

Sometime in the night, I heard something a little different than the steady rain. Went down with the flash light and the creek had backed all the way into the spring head. It was topping the bridge and going over a few inches. I moved the car to higher ground and went back and figured I'd wait it out - went back to sleep in the tent. At dawn the rain had stopped and the river dropped down under the bridge. I tossed the wet gear in the back and took off driving in a non-stop hard rain all the way back to the state border.

The briefly back under the bridge river.

This is usually about 18 inches deep here and crystal clear, about 9/10 feet deep.

The sand on top of the bridge from the night's flash flood.
It rained six more inches that day after I left.

Bluegs and troots

Memday trip to the cabin.

From last weekend - the boys trip to the U.P.
Yes - its a late recap post from last weekend.
But at least its being posted in the same month.


The seven year old is convinced he knows how to fly cast like a pro and can catch as many bluegs as he wants to prove it to me.


The 85 yr old man stayed at the lake cabin, l to r, the nephew, the dried out husk of his former shell recovering from calihanoichicagoU.P. jetlag, the seven year old, and the bro on the way down to the trout stream


Flinging that spinner on the family bit of the escy river


I can catch troots too...


Tuesday morning hard frost on the dock, after snow monday night


barefootin in the frost

Triploid Browns and Native Trout

Fish biology tells us that streams have specific holding capacity. Won't these trips' still displace the natives ?
from the pages at Fish Farmer magazine
22 April, 2008 -

PROTECTING native brown trout is at the heart of a new Environment Agency approach that it says will benefit both anglers and the native trout population in rivers and lakes throughout England and Wales.
Angling is one of the most popular outdoor pursuits, bringing many social and economic benefits. Every year, fishery owners and clubs introduce almost 700,000 fertile farmed trout into rivers and lakes to supplement stocks for anglers.
Under the new policy, infertile triploid brown trout will be used to stock these waters in a move to protect wild trout (including sea trout) stocks. The Environment Agency will stop giving consent to stock fertile farmed brown trout into rivers and most lakes in England and Wales from 2015. Targets have been set to encourage fishery managers to progressively switch to the use of infertile triploid fish to supplement trout stocks in these waters.

A little more information

The Prarie River regulations are not about caatch and release. They are about creating a section of the river where more, and larger trout can be caught and kept. This apparently offends some people. The idea of catching more, and larger trout. There are some statistics that it might be working:

It takes a while to grow large wild trout in northern streams. IT appears that the regulations are having a fairly dramatic effect in this one 5 mile stretch on a 42 mile trout stream.

I could, of course, understand that there is a problem with this, if there was no where else to fish for trout without using artificial lures and flies. The map below is the immediate area around the regulated water. The regulated water is depicted in red. Bait can be used in all of the water marked, blue, green and yellow.

It might be worthwhile to go back and read Mr, Aments comments in the column below.The regulation on that five mile stretch is hurting the kids.

The Heritage Strain

From the New Jersey Star Ledger

An old trout finds new life in Jersey waters

Friday, March 21, 2008

BY BRIAN T. MURRAY

Star-Ledger Staff

Something akin to a modern dinosaur is lurking in a few of New Jersey's backwoods creeks.

The brightly speckled and bluish brook trout living in at least 11 northern tributaries and streams are direct descendants of the "brookies" that splashed around after glaciers receded from the region 12,000 years ago, a seven-year study released yesterday has confirmed.

Called "heritage trout" because they are genetically linked to the first and only trout native to New Jersey waters, legislators honored the brook trout by naming it New Jersey's state fish in 1992. But the ancestral or heritage brookies were thought to have died out at the end of the 19th century, after hundreds of years of stream degradation that followed European settlement of the region.

"It's nice to be able to toot our horn a little that, not only do we have wild trout in New Jersey, but we also have populations that have been here a long time," said Principal Fisheries Biologist Patricia Hamilton of the state Division of Fish and Wildlife, who spearheaded the research.

"They may just have been a heartier fish," she said of how a few pockets of the "heritage trout" survived.

Volunteers, interns and one federal scientist helped in the genetic collection and analysis Hamilton conducted, largely in her spare time since 2000. She uncovered heritage trout populations in 11 tributaries, streams and creeks in two major river basins -- the Passaic-Hackensack and the Raritan.

Located mainly in Morris, Passaic and Bergen counties, and touching on Sussex and Hunterdon counties, the creeks and streams are largely at the headwater areas of the river basins where development has been scattered, and not as intense as in other areas. Some are remote sections of creeks commonly known among trout fishermen, such as Flanders Brook, Hacklebarney Brook and Havemeyer Brook.

Another "doesn't really have a name. I refer to it as south of Hoffman Tributary to the South Branch of the Raritan River. It's so small, it doesn't have an official name," Hamilton said.

The importance of the find ripples beyond New Jersey.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports that heritage brookies, genetically distinct in different areas, are declining in their original range from the Arctic Circle to Georgia and west to the Mississippi River. In 2004, the Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture was formed when 50 state and federal wildlife agencies, including New Jersey, joined private organizations and academic groups to outline efforts to preserve the heritage brookies.

Beyond conservation, the importance of the brook trout as an environmental indicator cannot be underestimated. The fish requires high-quality fresh water to survive. Where they are found is a good indicator of quality water.

When they are not found, trouble may exist -- and New Jersey did not realize it had any heritage trout left until now.

"It's fairly significant in a place like New Jersey," Hamilton said.

Heritage trout had to overcome not only development and pollution, but also a well-meaning, yet lethal re-introduction program. In 1879, New Jersey authorities tried to replenish its streams with farm-raised brook trout that carried a DNA strain from wild New Hampshire trout.

Non-native brown trout and rainbow trout soon followed, as the focus of stocking turned to feed the recreational fishing demands. There also was the "Johnny Appleseed" effect -- people privately stocking trout.

Those stocked species successfully spawned their own wild populations over the decades, and reproducing populations of browns, rainbows and brookies can be found in more than 964 miles -- or about 5 percent -- of New Jersey's 17,835 miles of streams and creeks. Biologists estimate that 120 creeks and streams carry wild brook trout -- and it was in 2000 that Hamilton set out to see if heritage trout were still swimming in any of them.

"It is absolutely astonishing to find that we have brookies placed here eons ago by the hand of God, not just trout stocked by men from stocking trucks," said Agust Gudmundsson of the New Jersey Council of Trout Unlimited, an environmental organization.

"I couldn't have dreamed that something like this was possible after the pounding we gave this state for hundreds of years. I have historic postcards of this area from the 1800s, and there wasn't a tree in sight. This is amazing," he added.

Brian Murray may be reached at bmurray@starledger.com.

March 22 trout & PB Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.


OZYMANDIAS -Percy Bysshe Shelley 1817

Started the day at 22 degrees, coullee hopped, three valleys and three creeks.