The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
FISH OR CUT BAIT
Trout will be biting as DEEP’s Great Park Pursuit launches with family day, filled with activities for all ages
KILLINGWORTH >> Hatchery-fed fish are pretty darn resilient.
When it comes time to stock the state’s streams and rivers during fishing season, it turns out that when Department of Energy and Environmental Protection staff fill the waters, they could gently lower a bucket of trout and gently coax them in, but it’s more likely the contents will be heaved into the water, said fisheries biologist Mike Beauchene. From the air. One would think trout suffer from shock when they’re smacked into the water. Not so, he said.
“In the truck, they get lulled into a rhythm after leaving the hatchery. They’re all crammed in there and when they get to the pond, if you gently put them in, they will stay there and not move, which makes them more likely to be preyed upon,” Beauchene said. “If the trout are flung into the water, you can see them swimming off pretty quickly and there they go.”
In more remote areas of some states, he said, fish will be flown in an airplane and as the aircraft moves fairly close to the water, those on board will drop them out, Beauchene said.
Which is why, when it comes to DEEP’s annual free fishing day — when no one, adult or child, is required to have a license — once kids discover that (and they will, quickly), those fish will be dropping from the sky.
The goal of the DEEP’s Great Park Pursuit is to encourage families who may not know or have experienced all that the state’s parks and forests have to offer, said Kristen Bellantuono, whose job is to encourage use of the state parks with public outreach.
This year’s free fishing day takes place Saturday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Chatfield Hollow State Park in Killingworth. The event will give participants a chance to enjoy games, tables with hands-on activities and information, borrow poles and pick up bait, and enjoy petting various pelts, hear talks and much more.
To ready the trout to be caught, hatchery workers essentially deprive the fish of food — for a short while, Beauchene said. “A couple of days before, we’ll take them off feed so they’ll be looking for food, and not the little pellets falling down from the sky” at the hatchery, he said.
Counter to what some fishermen may say to explain why recently stocked fish aren’t biting at any of the usual times of day, many are so hearty they’re raring to eat, Beauchene said. “Some can go into feeding mode right away. I’ve seen kids that have caught stocked fish a halfhour later.”
Another myth about fish he said he has debunked through his time kayak fishing is “they don’t go by a time clock. They can feed at any time during the day. Insects come out when there are low light levels,” he said, when prey like birds aren’t feeding.
The general rule of thumb most fishermen use is early in the morning and later in the afternoon — at sunrise and sunset,” said Beauchene, who used to fish at dawn.
That is until he started getting bites whenever he cast his reel. “I said to myself, ‘forget this. I want to sleep at night.’”
Bellantuono is coordinating Saturday’s event. Members of the Connecticut Aquatic Resources Education will be there helping kids and teaching them a little bit about the recreational sport, and the DEEP will be seining, which is the use of a long vertical net to gather (or scoop) aquatic species, placing them on the beach and allowing participants to examine what lives in the pond.
Members of the conservation group Connecticut Council of Trout Unlimited will be setting up an aquarium in a nearby building for children and there will be self-guided and guide-led walks in the woods during a program called “lost in the woods,” which will teach participants how read a map and trail blaze. For others, there will be a chance to play the very popular backyard bass cast game, Bellantuono said. Little ones will enjoy puzzles, bubble making and arts and crafts.
The deadline has passed to register for the Great Parks Pursuit, in which families who attend six organized events between May 13 and June 17 earn prizes at the completion. This year, she said, 602 teams registered to take part, a record number.
Chatfield Pond is stocked fairly frequently, Beauchene said, in addition to opening day (about 200 each time). Just over a week ago, more fish were added even though there are a good number of trout, native pickerel and bass already swimming around.
Because of hatchery issues, less frequently fished waterways are not being stocked this year, and at some locations, a smaller number of fish are set free in the water.
“Some were reduced in places where could we absorb the impact, where it would have a minimum impact on fishermen. They already had brown or brook trout so we cut those off the lists,” Beauchene said. “Also, some places we surveyed over the years get very few anglers coming to fish in those places so we were able to drop them temporarily for this year,” he said.
However most places will have the same amount of fish they’ve always had, he said.
There are three reasons why this year the DEEP is running a debt of 90,000 fish — about 14 percent — when staff used to stock half a million, Beauchene said.
“A lot of people think it’s because of the budget cuts through the governor, which was not the case,” he said. In fact, lower numbers are a combination of three factors.
The biggest impact of all, Beauchene said, was that the main hatchery in Plainfield, the Quinnipaug, needed extensive work and maintenance.
“The hatchery was built in 1972 and there never seems to be any money to fix stuff that needs to fixed,” he said. “It’s at the point now where it has to be fixed. We had to take four or five ponds offline, which means we couldn’t grow about 50,000 trout.”
Now, workers have to drain the pond, fix the pumping structure and complete draining and filtration, he said.
Another reason for the deficit is the drought of the previous 18 months. “Fish have to grow 12 to 15 inches this time of year and it takes about a year and a half for them to grow. The main fishery in Burlington relies on spring water, which is down 50 percent of capacity coming out of the ground, so that put a damper on it because we didn’t have enough water to grow them,” Beauchene said.
The last contributing factor was the hatcheries manager at the Kensington facility retired two years ago. “And we were not able to refill the position because of the budget freeze,” Beauchene said.
Now one person is managing both hatcheries.