Scouting Trout in the WW area

Hi trout fisherman and fisherwomen, I like to scout trout streams in November after the hunting season is over for shotgun on the deer. I have gone on numerous scouting trips over the years and have marvelled at the number of trout I have seen in the waters when I thought that they were socked out! Now my questions are, #1 have any of you people done this?, and # 2 is the N. Br. getting short of fish numbers? I am concerned about the N.Br. WW because it has been on a slot limit which until last year I thought was working. This year it was not good and I did not see any amount of fish like I have in the past few years. I am wondering what is happening. I will be asking the fisheries to do a shocking of this stream to find out if the stream is going down hill. Thanks for any input. JJ

I did OK (not great) on the NBWW this year. I did much better this spring during some hatch periods than other times, but I would say from a personal standpoint that there are not great large fish numbers despite special regs being on it for a while now. I have a sneaking suspicion that the 12-16 inch slot while allowing harvest is still a deternet to seeing more larger fish (remember, this is just an opinion).

Personally, I thought the NBWW fished better before there was a slot on it. I also think that harvest is still encouraged on that stream by Fisheries, as that would explain why I still run into those catchable rainbows now and again. Problem there is that harvest is still harvest – browns or rainbows.

I’d ask fisheries to send you any recent electro-shcoking data on the NBWW and then call Jason Moeckel and bounce some questions off of him. He’s a good guy and very personable, and I’m sure he’d be willing to answer your questions, as well as listen to your concerns.

Just my 2 cents,
D.A.

Thank you Dave Anderson! I will do that. JJ

I thought the fishing on the North Branch was worse this year than previous years also. The slot limit has been on that stream for a few years now and I personally didn’t see much of a difference over those years in the number of fish over 12 inches. I can’t really comment on the number of big fish (over 16) because I switched from fishing with live bait to fly fishing at about the same time the slot limit went on so I started catching less big fish everywhere because of that. The North Branch is not stocked with brown trout so it relies on natural reproduction. I think the reason the fishing has declined somewhat is because there have been a couple of poor hatches in recent years. Hopefully this years hatch will be better, but this fall was pretty dry so I don’t imagine the water flows are too great going into the winter.

I also agree that the NB of Whitewater doesn’t hold the amount of trout that it has in past years. My opinion is, the large amount of runoff during the 2005 spring melt was the most likely cause. In January 2005, my fishing log shows that I did very well on numbers of fish caught. Then later in the spring as much of the snow melted I witnessed some runoff events that I’m sure were not good for the fish with lots of what looked like manure in it. I really thought we would have a substancial fish kill the one day I was there but didn’t see or hear of anyone seeing dead fish. Anyway, after that, fishing success on the NB dropped off dramically for me. The good news is that I have never seen so many small trout fry(1-2 inch) as I had late last summer and fall so it should bounce back nicely.