How they stock fish in remote lakes | The Woodsman Hut | Forums

Some reason I am picturing Tom Hanks screaming Wilson!!!!!!!!!

easytapper said
I wouldn't have thought that remote lakes need to be stocked.

yeah, they do it to some of the more remote areas here in Maine

RANGELEY – Purple-black rain clouds are rolling in, so the warden pilots who are responsible for getting thousands of fish to some of the state’s most remote lakes don’t have much time for conversation.

A floatplane lands on Rangeley Lake and sputters to shore, and a pit crew of hatchery workers who have driven from across the state to support this operation leap into action. The men trip over one another as they hurriedly slosh buckets full of squirming brook trout into tanks mounted on the plane’s pontoons.

Before you can say “bombs away,” the plane is loaded with 950 fish and flying off toward the Western Mountains.

Every fall, the state stocks 150,000 fish from the air, just a fraction of the annual stocking order of 1.2 million trout and salmon that are grown in the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s hatcheries and fish-rearing stations, hatchery Superintendent Steven Wilson said this week.

During hunting season, the warden pilots are busy monitoring hunters and can’t drop fish stock. So in two hectic weeks between the September and October moose-hunting seasons, warden service planes fly over remote ponds too small to land on, and release hundreds of fish in an 80-mile-per hour, 100-foot free-fall to the water.

But the fish are tough, they can handle the skydiving, Gene Arsenault, of the Embden Rearing Station said this week.

“You’ll lose a few,” he said. “But the benefits of doing it this way far outweigh any losses.”

Without the planes, most of these ponds simply wouldn’t have fish. Though they boast the cold water and rugged scenery to please both fish and anglers, many of Maine’s mountainous ponds lack the spawning grounds to promote a natural fish population.

Driving to these remote areas with the hatchery’s tank trucks, which pump fish into more accessible locales, just isn’t an option here.

“They’re so difficult to get into, even with a four-wheel drive, that it’s just cheaper and easier to do it by plane,” Arsenault said.

East Richardson Pond in Adamstown Township, one of the locations stocked this week, is testimony to Arsenault’s understatement.

The water is a good 45-minute walk over wildlife trails and skidder roads clogged with dead branches – and, occasionally, a moose or two.

The shore of the pond is a wall of trees right down to the water, with plush cushions of six-inch-deep moss and brilliant orange and green lichens glistening on boulders. The slightest sound echoes back from every corner of the lake.

Anglers tell DIF&W time and again that they’re seeking this type of wilderness experience, and the state does its best to comply, Wilson said.

In addition to the October flights, about 700 bodies of water are stocked with fish by truck, by bucket and even occasionally by backpack every spring and fall.

Last November, voters approved a $7 million bond to improve the state’s aging hatchery system and double the pounds of fish to be stocked each year in hopes of boosting the state’s fishing industry.

Construction of new oxygenation systems at five hatcheries will begin this month with a price tag of about $400,000.

And DIF&W has just announced a contract with an Illinois company called FishPro to complete a multimillion-dollar reconstruction at the Embden Rearing Station.

“By spring, we’ll be starting to turn dirt, and it should be up and running by 2005,” Wilson said.

When the hatchery improvements are complete, the stocking seasons will become even busier – a problem that the department may have to solve using a bare-bones budget, without the funds for hiring additional staff or paying overtime.

“Our staff are going to have more pounds of fish to move in the same amount of time,” Wilson said. “It’s just going to get more hectic.

http://archive.bango.....oss-maine/

great, now I can't get that picture out of my mind