Trout and high temps?

[pcray1231]

If anglers want that kind of experience, they can get together with some like minded individuals, build a float box or float barrel or two and have at it at an appropriate water for float stocking, maybe even your favorite stream.

They tell you NO if you have one and ask! They won't even give you a bucket to carry, and have eliminated many of the stocking points that require buckets in favor of places they can utilize the fish cannon. They don't want help from the public and if you show up, turn you away.

BTW talking about NW PA in general, not SE. The official excuse is timing. They can only have fish in the truck for so long by rule and it takes nearly 3 hrs to get here, so they don't have time to do anything but a fish cannon.

 

[Fish Sticks]

The other thing is these stocked trout streams that can’t support stream born brown or rainbow trout in summer E-shocking times have amazing fisheries a lot if times without any manufactured game fish added in spring. Who doesn’t want to fight this guy on a slow action 3 weight in the spring.

Or these guys in summer.

If we just acknowledged warm water fisheries are in these streams in the summer when they shock and determine no trout and that stream born trout fisheries exist in alot of these streams in the winter/early spring that are considered “trout less” based on summer electro surveys, we (people who don’t like combat fishing or don’t like ALWAYSfishing behind one or several people) would have better fishing experience because less hords of people following the white truck to one packed location like some bad sociology experiment. And we could take money from hatcheries, once accounted for drop in license sales, to invest in the grossly underfunded management of our native game and non gamefish/mollusks/amphibians which would have hard to measure indirect positive effects on the non stocked fisheries.


Only problem is people won’t accept these game fish because they require more time and effort to catch have been socially conditioned by PFBC to accept stocked trout as game fish and license sales will drop, however the bass, catfish, panfish crowd isn’t going anywhere and people will switch over and still purchase a license to a large degree id imagine if they weren’t already purchasing a license for both trout and warm water.

Needless to say this will never happen because at this point this approach would sound like pure lunacy to PFBC leadership and be a nuclear catastrophe in their eyes compared to merely losing our state fish and a myriad of future threatened or endangered fish/amphibians.

 

[Oregon_OwlII]

^ I've seen this happen a long time ago on Fishing Creek, the Columbia County one, in the FFing stretch (at that time) at Grassmere Park. Many trout (dozens) were all stacked in a hole like cord wood. Looking back I should have taken a temp reading there as well as other areas to see the temperature variations causing the trout to huddle up in one hole.

Had a similar experience on the same Fishing Creek, but the trout were not stacked up in a hole. Small wild trout (@8 inches) were rising at dusk in 78-degree water. There was a decent hatch on. Did not fish it because of the temps, but there was no doubt that the fish were feeding.

 

[Swattie87]

Had a similar experience on the same Fishing Creek, but the trout were not stacked up in a hole. Small wild trout (@8 inches) were rising at dusk in 78-degree water. There was a decent hatch on. Did not fish it because of the temps, but there was no doubt that the fish were feeding.

There’s definitely some weird/unique geological phenomena with that stream. It’s not limestone, and not limestone water from an alkalinity perspective but it’s got sinks in it during low flows that are similar to what happens on limestone streams. (Think the other Fishing Creek between Lamar and Mill Hall for example.) The water being temporarily underground has a dramatic cooling effect on the water, in comparison to other streams its size that aren’t limestone. As long as the fish know where to go, and flee the section that sinks, this can be a good thing.