Rain

USGS says we only got .60" of rain here. The rain gauge in my front yard shows more like 1.5".

Everything is blows out.
 
I would not say the ground water levels were fine around Williamsport, before this last shot of rain many of the smaller streams were dropping very fast... It stinks when the main creeks are blown out but groundwater is hard to measure and this past week has been great to recharge the system.
 
I had some thoughts of fishing this weekend. But am staying home to work on honey do list. Try again next weekend

I wouldn't mind seeing rain like this in july and august.
But not now - just as we're reaching the peak of the mayfly hatches
 
Great time to hit up some small feeders to the Main stem. I did well this morning with a dark green zonker in ugly looking water.
 
dryflyguy wrote:
I wouldn't mind seeing rain like this in july and august.
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I couldn't agree more, but it rarely does. I guess we'll take what we can get though.
 
wildtrout2 wrote:
dryflyguy wrote:
I wouldn't mind seeing rain like this in july and august.
Click to expand...
I couldn't agree more, but it rarely does. I guess we'll take what we can get though.
Click to expand...

The summers of '14 and '15 were very wet, if I recall correctly.
 
TYoung wrote:
In Central PA it is getting to the point were there is almost too much water. Going from severe drought conditions to almost flood conditions from one season to the next is not good. Streams that have marginal wild trout populations can be really hurt by the extreme water flows.
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Severe droughts like last summer's hurt trout populations.

And severe scouring floods like occurred in September 2011 in the Loyalsock drainage also hurt trout populations.

But the water flows we are experiencing now in central and NC PA are not even close to those levels.

These are very normal spring flows and not at all harmful to the trout populations.

On the USGS flow website, it's interesting to click on "Peak", and compare current flow levels to the highest recorded.
 
troutbert wrote:
Trout will often rise freely in water that is surprisingly high and off color, if there are a lot of bugs.

But there is a limit to that. It depends on how high and off color the water is.

If there are bridges getting washed out, you won't find much dry fly fishing.
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My experience tells me this will happen much more frequently with wild fish of decent size. I don't see stockies do this much. But a place like Penns or Spring especially will have risers in rather high water up tight to the banks.

syl
 
Have there ever been any stream surveys or shocking done before and after droughts or floods on streams that would show how much or how little the trout populations are actually affected by them? Last summer up in the Williamsport area we basically had a 4 month drought which was ended by the 4th largest flood in history on lycoming and possibly the largest on some of the smaller streams in the area. The double whammy. I expected poor fishing at best this past winter and spring, but I have come to find out that most of the streams that had wild trout up here are fishing just as well as they were last spring. A couple of them seem to have more wild trout than they ever have. I have also heard over the years that major floods adversely affect hatches. I haven't observed any significant changes on any hatches so far this year, or any of the other years we had major flooding.
 
Reeder for the most part I have experienced similar wild trout numbers in streams that I have fished before and after last falls flood events. However the streams that got hit the worst, such as Pleasant Stream are basically destroyed. I haven't tried fishing it since, but the habitat is virtually gone. Several other small streams appear to have similar impacts. I'm sure there are wild trout left and the population will come back over time as the habitat improves but for the time being I would imagine the trout populations took a major hit in those streams.
 
Here's a study that was done after a catastrophic flood in VA in the 1990's. I've fished the stream mentioned several times - it's quite good, but you can still see evidence of the debris flow.

SNP flood
 
Delaware Water Gap tribs study.

I think it is really hard to separate all the variables that contribute to trout populations and definitively pin a drought or a flood as the only variable that affected population. They definitely influence populations, but what other dials get tweaked when a drought or a flood occurs?

Anecdotally, the streams I've fished so far this year have fished well and they have all been in low 2016 water level areas. I have not fished NC PA yet, but all the reports I've read so far is that it has fished poorly. But the water is still high and cold, which is also a variable that contributes to poor fishing, at times.
 
Here's a link to another study on flood impacts on trout populations in WV:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1577/T02-112
 
Pretty interesting article that sarce posted. The reds and the first year trout seem to get wiped out, which makes sense, but then they bounce back in greater numbers at a faster growth rate until the population rebounds. It did not say a lot about larger trout. I fished pleasant with a friend last week for about 2 hours. The devastation was unbelievable. The water was high, cold and a little off color. The first thing I noticed was the cloud of spinners dropping down on the water. We didn't see a fish rise, but that was at least a positive sign. We ended up nymphing and picking up 2 wild brook trout in the 5-7 inch range and 4 wild browns from 7-12 inches. If the water ever comes back down I am going to head up when the conditions are a little better and see what happens.
 
Regarding Pleasant Stream. After one of the big floods in the past, probably the Jan 1996 rain-on-snow flood, I saw a lot of channelization of Pleasant Stream.

This was in the lower sections, where there are many cabins in the floodplain, some quite close to the stream.

And the road is in the floodplain and close to the stream in places also.

 
Several of the cabins were in the floodway of pleasant stream and are now gone. Long stretches of the road are gone. At some point the road is going to have to be put up on the rail road grade. There was a lot of talk about it this fall, but I believe the main issue is funding. Landowners were told after the flood this fall that they could do whatever they wanted with heavy equipment in the stream. Personally I thought it was just starting to really recover from 2011 last year, a lot of really nice holes had developed and I had several good fishing days.
 
The rain Friday and Saturday created the best high water conditions I've fished in quite a while. Since last Friday, a friend and I have caught wild browns of 18, 20, 22, and 23 inches on a small mountain stream. We waited all last spring and summer for those conditions and it never rained enough, it was painful. More rain on the way Friday-Saturday, I say bring it on. It might suck for the hatches on larger waters but this water is needed on the small streams. I noticed a lot of silt building up in some streams and all this rain is really cleaning things out.
 
When forest roads are in the floodplain:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjrpV_A8eH0

Big Bear Creek, Lycoming County
 
Nice, relatively slow falls to the curves on the USGS gauges in response to that last rain event for a lot of the big central PA streams...Penns/Spring/LJR/Kish, even Kettle and Pine seemed to have held their water pretty well. Bad for the short term fishing I know, but good for the long term.

Without another whopper, they could all be in really nice shape for sulphurs.
 
I heard we may get a good bit more rain on Saturday from a possible nor'easter. SE Pa could use more rain, that's for sure. We're good in NC for now. lol
 
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