In your experience, when do wild trout in small streams become active after their winter torpor?

[Acristickid]

After the hatches end on the bigger waters, the smaller waters will be good.

 

[sarce]

MD yesterday: a few brookies active. Not a feeding rampage yet.

 

[pcray1231]

Mike,

Not a critisism. But I roll my eyes a little every time "legal size" is mentioned as a criteria. It's nearly meaningless to me.

Stocked streams, ok, but there aren't any sublegal ones really anyway. But in the wild trout world most fisherman are C&R. We do have mental size categories. Dink, small, solid, big, monster, slab, whatever people use. And those categories are entirely relative to the stream. There are places where a 7 incher is a solid fish and places where its a dink. But I don't know of anywhere where a 6" fish is in an entirely different class than a 7" fish, anymore than people would discriminate between a 15 and 16" fish.

 

[Swattie87]

Legal size will be very important to me this coming Opening Day weekend, as I plan to help extirpate some stocked invaders from streams that shouldn’t be stocked and, have viable wild Trout populations.

Need to add lemons, onions, Cajun seasoning, and peanut oil to tonight’s grocery run.

 

[pcray1231]

Even then, do you really think you'll ever measure? You're going to look, and say stocked or wild.

Any stocked invaders you extirpate will all be clearly be legal. And you ain't gonna care if they are 10" or 11" either. Any wild fish you happen to catch in the borderline category, you ain't gonna measure to determine if it's 6 1/2" or 7 1/4". You're just gonna say "cool" and release it.

Oh, sure, you might catch a 15+ incher, wild or stocked. And measure it just to see. That's in a different size class altogether. We sometimes measure the big fish.

I've kept fish in my life and will again, maybe this weekend with my boy. But NEVER in my 42 years of life have I measured a trout in the 6-8" category. In a lifetime of trout fishing, being among fly, spin, bait, and lure guys, some who keep trout commonly, I have never once heard any of them utter the phrase "legal sized" in conversation. When discussing which streams are good and bad, even when talking specifically about fish size distribution in those streams, I don't recall anyone using "legal sized" as a criteria.

Maybe it's just me? I dunno. It wasn't meant to be a cut in any way. There has to be a minimum size for regulation purposes, I get that. 7" is a good number, it permits keeping of all stocked trout and protects a decent percentage of wild ones especially in small streams. And the REASON that it's a good regulatory number is precisely because it's about as meaningless a number as you can come up with. Nobody has to think about it or carry a tape. All stocked trout are legal. Nobody's keeping small wild trout anyway, whether they are 6 or 8". WCO's don't have to ask people to pull out their stringers and take a tape to each fish.

 

[Swattie87]

Even then, do you really think you'll ever measure? You're going to look, and say stocked or wild.

Any stocked invaders you extirpate will all be clearly be legal. And you ain't gonna care if they are 10" or 11" either. Any wild fish you happen to catch in the borderline category, you ain't gonna measure to determine if it's 6 1/2" or 7 1/4". You're just gonna say "cool" and release it.

Oh, sure, you might catch a 15+ incher, wild or stocked. And measure it just to see. That's in a different size class altogether. We sometimes measure the big fish.

I've kept fish in my life and will again, maybe this weekend with my boy. But NEVER in my 42 years of life have I measured a trout in the 6-8" category. In a lifetime of trout fishing, being among fly, spin, bait, and lure guys, some who keep trout commonly, I have never once heard any of them utter the phrase "legal sized" in conversation. When discussing which streams are good and bad, even when talking specifically about fish size distribution in those streams, I don't recall anyone using "legal sized" as a criteria.

Maybe it's just me? I dunno. It wasn't meant to be a cut in any way. There has to be a minimum size for regulation purposes, I get that. 7" is a good number, it permits keeping of all stocked trout and protects a decent percentage of wild ones especially in small streams. And the REASON that it's a good regulatory number is precisely because it's about as meaningless a number as you can come up with. Nobody has to think about it or carry a tape. All stocked trout are legal. Nobody's keeping small wild trout anyway, whether they are 6 or 8". WCO's don't have to ask people to pull out their stringers and take a tape to each fish.

Haha, I was just joking. And mostly just taking an opportunity to take a dig at stocking small freestone wild Trout streams.

But yeah, I agree with you. I won’t be measuring tomorrow. Just the first 2 or 3 that are obviously stocked, and obviously of legal size are going to get bonked.

I do measure the bigger ones. 15” or so is a good baseline where I start taking a measurement. I fish small streams mostly and only catch a handful of these class fish a year. So I’m not measuring often. Everything else gets estimated…12” range, for example.

I have measured 6-8” fish is this one scenario however…Maybe once a year, or every other year, I harvest a couple wild fish for the campfire while on a multi-day backpacking trip. In that scenario I’m actually deliberately trying to keep fish that are just above legal size, so as to keep the larger fish in the gene pool. I’ll measure in that scenario to be sure what I’m harvesting is legal. I’m talking like maybe two fish a year though.

 

[silfeid]

Even then, do you really think you'll ever measure? You're going to look, and say stocked or wild.

Any stocked invaders you extirpate will all be clearly be legal. And you ain't gonna care if they are 10" or 11" either. Any wild fish you happen to catch in the borderline category, you ain't gonna measure to determine if it's 6 1/2" or 7 1/4". You're just gonna say "cool" and release it.

Oh, sure, you might catch a 15+ incher, wild or stocked. And measure it just to see. That's in a different size class altogether. We sometimes measure the big fish.

I've kept fish in my life and will again, maybe this weekend with my boy. But NEVER in my 42 years of life have I measured a trout in the 6-8" category. In a lifetime of trout fishing, being among fly, spin, bait, and lure guys, some who keep trout commonly, I have never once heard any of them utter the phrase "legal sized" in conversation. When discussing which streams are good and bad, even when talking specifically about fish size distribution in those streams, I don't recall anyone using "legal sized" as a criteria.

Maybe it's just me? I dunno. It wasn't meant to be a cut in any way. There has to be a minimum size for regulation purposes, I get that. 7" is a good number, it permits keeping of all stocked trout and protects a decent percentage of wild ones especially in small streams. And the REASON that it's a good regulatory number is precisely because it's about as meaningless a number as you can come up with. Nobody has to think about it or carry a tape. All stocked trout are legal. Nobody's keeping small wild trout anyway, whether they are 6 or 8". WCO's don't have to ask people to pull out their stringers and take a tape to each fish.

"Nobody's keeping small wild trout anyway, whether they are 6 or 8"."

Unfortunately, I really don't think this is true, at least not in Southwestern PA, where I mostly fish. I'm certain that there are plenty of spin fishermen in Westmoreland, Somerset, and Fayette counties who are quite happy to keep their daily limit of 7"+ fish, regardless of whether they're stocked or wild.

IMO, a majority of license purchasers in our state (or at least my part of it) still just don't reflect on the nature or especially the fragility of the resource. Just the other day, I was chatting with a local (he wasn't fishing) on the trail along Meadow Run at Ohiopyle. When I mentioned that the stream was C&R only for most of the warmer part of the year (it's DHALO), his immediate reaction was "Well that sucks."

That's a pretty typical reaction, in my experience. People in SWPA are fairly obsessed with keeping fish, and a lot of them don't give a damn whether it's a native or a stocked fish. Obviously that generalization excludes fly the great majority of fly fishers, but how many spin fishers (or baitcasters, or what-have-you) are there out there for every fly fisher?

 

[troutbert]

Nobody's keeping small wild trout anyway, whether they are 6 or 8".

That's definitely not true. Many people keep brook trout that are 7 inches long. Many keep 6 inchers too.

 

[Chaz]

Wild trout are active all year. Especially remote streams. Even on the best know water trout are active all year. A good example is a New Year day around 2000, on the alto. Lehigh the air temperature was 17 degrees the water Temperature was 38 degrees, there were stone flies and midges hatching and until snow melt started hitting the water trout were rising through the entire FFO Section.
I’ve been out on other mid-winter days when freestone streams were quite active with feeding trout.

 

[troutbert]

May 9. The fishing for wild brook trout in a small stream with dry flies was very good on May 9. In the afternoon of course, after things warmed up.

 

[Swattie87]

May 9. The fishing for wild brook trout in a small stream with dry flies was very good on May 9. In the afternoon of course, after things warmed up.

I had lights out action on an all, or nearly all, Brook Trout stream last weekend on 04/30. Water temp was 50. Good Hendrickson spinner fall going on a tiny mountain freestone stream. Though they ate my Yellow Humpy and my wife’s Stimulator just as well. Somerset County, but the eastern end, down off the Allegheny Front.

Conversely, I fished a mostly Brown Trout stream yesterday, 5/8. Sullivan County. Water temps also 50 deg. Did good, but not as good as the previous weekend. Fished a dry dropper. Caught mostly Browns, all but two of which (both dinks) ate the dropper. Got a few Brookies too, all on the dry. Illustrates the different feeding patterns of the species pretty well IMO. FWIW.

I stick to mid-May as being the timeframe when you can reliably start expecting action to pick up on PA small freestone streams.

 

[silfeid]

I had lights out action on an all, or nearly all, Brook Trout stream last weekend on 04/30. Water temp was 50. Good Hendrickson spinner fall going on a tiny mountain freestone stream. Though they ate my Yellow Humpy and my wife’s Stimulator just as well. Somerset County, but the eastern end, down off the Allegheny Front.

Conversely, I fished a mostly Brown Trout stream yesterday, 5/8. Sullivan County. Water temps also 50 deg. Did good, but not as good as the previous weekend. Fished a dry dropper. Caught mostly Browns, all but two of which (both dinks) ate the dropper. Got a few Brookies too, all on the dry. Illustrates the different feeding patterns of the species pretty well IMO. FWIW.

I stick to mid-May as being the timeframe when you can reliably start expecting action to pick up on PA small freestone streams.

That jives pretty well with my experience too.