Hmmmmm? This has been the exact opposite of my 30+ years of fishing Kettle. I may be fishing quite higher up in the watershed than you.
I agree. Regardless of where you are above Alvin Bush, it depends on the time of year in the mainstem.
Once again, folks have to get over what they see on August 12th and thinking that prevents trout from using the river. I know it gets low and clear in August way downstream, and most of the trout move out. Contrary to some beliefs, trout don't simply die when the water gets warm. They swim. Now, stocked trout may go belly up because they're dumb as a box of rocks, but that doesn't mean wild native brook trout that evolved in that watershed do the same.
Frankly, I'm not convinced the stocked trout simply die, either. According to PA Fish & Boat, stocked trout are capable of swimming long distances. Including one rainbow trout swimming 123 miles.
Just because you don't see fish or catch fish in one section during one time of the year doesn't mean they aren't there during other times of the year. Once again, those waters that "get too warm" are critically important habitats over the winter when the tributaries might get locked up with anchor ice and where winter-time food is more scarce.
This gets at one of the biggest problems in PA in my opinion (I say that a lot). PFBC surveys streams in late summer when trout are concentrated in thermal refugia. So if you base management decisions on the worst case scenario for wild trout presence, you're going to come up with a lot more water to stock because there were no wild trout present in August. Meanwhile, you're stocking right over top wild native brook trout that are in that "Frog water" in April before migrating back up the tributaries to ride out the heat. So you're drawing large numbers of anglers to winter refuge and dumping thousands of stocked trout on top of wild fish. Stocking should be based on electrofishing surveys conducted when the trout are stocked, not when they're all stuffed into cold water tributaries.
Before the comments start, yes, it's approximately 20% of the population on average that moves (it's likely far more and far less in some cases). How important are those fish with the life history/survival strategy to move like that, though? That's exactly why MD made all waters west of 81 C&R for brook trout in stocked waters. They're finding brook trout in frog water in late March when the trout season opens. Those fish that move are likely extremely important to the metapopulation. So it might be rare to catch a 9 inch brook trout in some lower river frog water in April, but how important is that single fish? Why not protect that individual in case their role in the population is far more important than we understand today?
There are now several research papers on movement, but here's one with a good quote that summarizes the above. "Main-stem-resident trout were never observed in water exceeding 19.5°C. Our study provides some of the first data on brook trout movements in a large Appalachian river system and underscores the importance of managing trout fisheries in a riverscape context. Brook trout conservation in this region will depend on restoration and protection of coldwater refugia in larger river main stems as well as removal of barriers to trout movement near tributary and main-stem confluences."
https://doi.org/10.1080/00028487.2012.681102
This is what irritates me with the Slot Limit regulation that was recently passed and is now being applied to more waters. They completely ignored brook trout in larger mainstem rivers. Someone said it was because that reg type won't be applied to waters that have brook trout. Well, it's applied to Penns Ck. It's just blatant disregard for brook trout conservation science.
Sorry for the rant.
