Indigenous Fishes

Editor's note: Tradition has always been a common thread on this blog. The following guest post is a fine example of that, as Aaron Swanson details a unique camping and fishing trip that he and Tommy Baranowski have been going on the same weekend for years. They both captured great images that help tell the story.

Some friends and I make an annual overnight trip on Columbus Day weekend.  We hike into the wilderness and camp near a small blue line on a map, a stream far from any paved roads or signs of human development. 

I wonder what the mountain stream we fish each year on the weekend named for the fabled, if not modernly controversial, explorer looked like at the time he first stepped foot in America Hispaniola. If I had to guess, the river and its inhabitants look very much as they do today.  It isn’t the fish or the stream that has changed, but the humans that live in the area.  It is a tired point, but valid, that since European settlers colonized the place we call home the landscape has changed drastically. Much of our environment has been altered to the point where the kinds of life that once thrived here can no longer do so.  This remote mountain stream and its inhabitants are special. They have largely escaped the consequences wrought by discovery, exploration and settlement that create our shared history.

The point of this story is not to dissect the past.  Instead it is to share the enjoyment of being able to take what feels like a step back into it. The boulders and gorges that outline and dictate the flow of the stream seem so permanent.  We hop across them and find in their pools the fish that bring us to such a wild place.

 

Mind you, during this hike, we enjoy plenty of modern day comforts.  What started out years ago as a bare-bones hike and overnight fishing trip has, as many traditions tend to do, grown a bit more extravagant over the years.  The quality of the food and beverage we pack in has increased sharply. Yet the core of the trip remains the same; the trail, the scenery, that noticeable start of the change of the season, the fishing, the bullshitting, the laughs and the quiet remain the real draw.

 

A neat thing about a tradition like this one is the variety of conditions you get to observe at a familiar place as the years pass.  This year we have been blessed with plenty of rain to fill our streams, reservoirs and water table. The stream this year was full, and it made for better scenery and fishing than found in prior years when low water made the stream but a trickle.

The fish seemed energized, they were healthy and bright in hand and quick to take our flies in the water.   The fishing was fun.  If you looked at a spot that looked like it held fish, it did.

As we prepared for this year’s trip, we agreed that this little overnight has become something we look forward to and cherish. It has a special feel. Much of it can be hard to adequately describe, but can be easily seen in the pictures we take to remember each individual year. As fall is now fully upon us I’m thankful I could spend another night in one of the most beautiful places found within our state’s borders. I take comfort knowing that not much has changed here and that each year we can mark the passage of time by paying a visit to one of our state’s most beautiful indigenous fishes.

Fresh Tracks

One of the last brushes with winter found me in the woods along a wild trout stream. The snowfall had just ceased but still clung to everything. When the sun poked out, it melted fast and poured down like rain from the canopy. The woods were quiet and my lone footprints meant the trout had yet to see a fly that day. It was one of the better days I had spent on the water in some time. 

Link to video.

The Fight for Roaring Brook

Editor's note: Whether its fighting for hatcheries on the chopping block, historic homes facing demolition or precious natural spaces at risk of development, I'm all for taking a stand for what you believe in. That's why I'm happy to share the following piece form my friend Chad Wilde, who makes a heartfelt call-to-action to help protect a special blue line in Northeast Connecticut. 

“According to Indian legend, brook trout were not always the speckled beauties we know today.  “Once, long, long ago,” said old Jesse Logan, of the Cornplanter Reservation in Warren County Pennsylvania, the last (in 1928) of the Shikellemus tribe, “when Manitou visited the land of the Iroquois to lead His lost children back to the Happy Hunting Ground in the Far East, He grew weak with hunger and cold on his long quest.  Toward night He stopped beside a pool in the Seneca country [New York] which was overshadowed by colossal white pines and hemlocks.  Noticing that it was full of handsome trout, as black as ebony, He reached in His hand and easily caught the largest of the superb fish.  Looking at it He was struck by its beauty and agile grace, and decided to control His hunger and let it live, so He dropped it back into the deep pool.

“The trout went its way, but instantly its sides took on a silvery hue where the fingers of the Great Spirit had held it, and all of its kind became marked with the same silvery sheen and many colored spots and halos, as a token of their having been handled by the kindly Manitou.  For that reason, the Seneca Indians and others of the Six Nations would not eat brook trout.  Brook trout were sacred to the highest instincts of their race.  But what the redman spared,” said Logan, “white men destroyed by the millions.”

                                                                                                                     ~From Nick Karas' book Brook Trout

As an angler, I have seen first hand what mans intrusion into our wild places can do to fish.  I have watched it with my own eyes.  Over the past 4 decades, if you looked in the right places, these subtle but nefarious changes were impossible to miss.  Today, we must protect what natural resources we still have.  One such resource in dire need of our stewardship is Roaring Brook in Willington Connecticut.

I grew up on a circle of tract housing laid into the side of Village Hill just upland from Roaring Brook.  I caught my first trout in our backyard.  It was a brook trout, and I caught it out of a drainage pipe.  This was sometime in the early eighties when I was a child.

There was a small stream that flowed into a culvert at the top of our road.  The water ran through a storm drain under the street to another culvert in front of my house where some of it spilled out.  From there this trickle flowed behind our home, through the woods, downhill and into Roaring Brook. 

My brother and I had been fishing with our father before.  I don’t recall how old we were but we were old enough to go out on rainy nights and harvest night crawlers to fish with.  I remember walking and exploring the stream and coming to small pools where the rocks were covered in green moss, in them we saw small fish dart about.  So quick, and then hidden.  Gone. 

We caught these fish, on bits of worm, cast up into the drainage pipe from the mouth of the small culvert.  We didn’t know what they were.  Naturally, we put them in a bucket with stream water.  When our father got home from work, he identified them as brook trout.  As we grew, we followed the stream down through the woods, it was a tributary of Roaring Brook.  When we were old enough to do so we rode our bikes to this slightly larger stream and spread our wings in exploration.

We would swim in the deep pools and explore the stone foundation of Eldredge Mills, a site recognized by the National Historical Register.  To this day you can see the great stone circle of its turbine pit, which I tell my children is a castle.  I show them the stone walled sluiceway that the early millers used to divert the water and power their saw and grist mills.  Above these links to our colonial past rise tall hemlock, oak and maple trees.  Below them flows Roaring Brook.

As a child my friends and I would find crayfish and hellgrammites below stones in the brook.  There were great mechanical looking stonefly nymphs that would leave their molted husks on the streamside rocks.  We found salamanders beneath moldering logs in the forest, their skin slick and their tiny hands so delicate.  There were brook and brown trout in the water.    

Most people don’t consider the link brook trout have to our heritage as New Englanders.  Brook trout are native to waters throughout New England.  This means that their lineage developed indigenously in the water that drains our region.  Their natural range encompassed a good portion of the eastern United States, extending from Canada to high mountain streams in northern Georgia and west to the Great Lakes basin.

This habitat range has been drastically reduced by mans infringement.  Brook trout require cold, clean, well oxygenated water to survive.  They require highly specific pristine habitat conditions.  These native fish developed in the place that was right for them and they were entrenched in these places long before European men set foot on North American soil.

Like brook trout, some people develop in the right place.  When it was time to buy a home with my wife and start a family I chose to do so in the neighborhood where I grew up, in Willington.  I was elated to do so.  I envisioned my children exploring the same watershed I did in my youth.  I was back on Roaring Brook, our home is less than a mile from its banks.

I consider this my home water.  Throughout my life, I’ve always lived around Northeastern Connecticut.  As an angler I have spent more time on Roaring Brook than any other stream.  I’ve always caught fish, and many wild fish.  I have walked and fished a good portion of the brook from its mouth at the Willimantic River in Willington to its headwaters in northwest Union.  Throughout its entire length it contains good trout habitat.

I know there are no more brook trout in the small stream that flowed behind my parents home.  There is sand and water grown too warm to support fish.  Sediment and warm water are lethal brook trout.  Sediment obscures their spawning gravel and chokes eggs.  Warm water carries less dissolved oxygen than cold water.  Luckily, Roaring Brook is still suitable to support wild fish. 

Not truly trout, brook trout are actually considered char.  Trout and char are both members of the Salmonidae genetic family, but only char are native to the Eastern seaboard of North America.  Char differ from trout in appearance in that they have lighter colored spots against a dark colored body where trout generally have darker spots against a light one.

Brook trout are gorgeous fish.  Their backs are shades of steel blue and olive, they have tan vermiculate patterns descending towards their flanks.  Their spots are yellow, and they also carry vivid red spots haloed by blue.  Their fins are tipped with white.  In autumn, when they prepare to spawn, the male bellies take on a deep orange hue. 

As I have fished roaring brook over the past decade I have caught wild brook and brown trout.  I always approach my angling here with trepidation.  I realize we stand at a pivotal point in our species development with regards to protection of our natural resources.  Each time I set foot on its banks, I hope deep in my heart that there are still trout swimming in the brook.  To this point, my hope has been confirmed by my catches and release of wild trout.

I am always relieved when I see one at the end of my line.  These aren’t huge fish.  A mature wild fish will often only be 6 to 8 inches long.  Coldwater fish are the litmus test of a New England stream.  Where they are found you will find clean water and a healthy natural environment.  Connecticut has classified Roaring Brook as a class 3 wild trout stream, meaning that there is natural reproduction occurring, and populations are supplemented by stocked adult and fry (infant) trout.

Roaring Brook’s habitat is currently threatened by a proposal by Love’s Travel Stop to build a truck stop and restaurant off of exit 71 westbound on route 84.  This facility will be 40 acres and will cover parts of roaring brook and two crucial wetlands that drain directly into its water. 

In 2012 Love’s received approval from the Willington Inland Wetlands and Watercourses Commission to develop land off Polester Road.  In 2013 they were granted additional approval from Willington’s Planning and Zoning Commission with certain conditions applied.

At that time, senior fisheries biologist Brian Murphy of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection’s assessed and documented the proposed building site.  What he found was a site bordering a brook that is deeply shaded by thick woodland, helping to keep the water cool for trout to live in.  He saw cobbled gravel on the streambed, creating a place for trout to spawn.  He found riffles and runs that tumbled the water, creating oxygen and places where trout could feed.  He found woody debris and boulders, hiding places, what is known as a micro-habitat where juvenile trout make their homes and where insects provide forage. 

In essence he found the heart of my home water, a nice healthy little trout stream.

Murphy observed 2 wetlands that directly fed Roaring Brook.  In one of them, he found yearling brook trout.  This indicated that in the fall of 2012 brook trout had successfully spawned in the wetland channel.  Brook trout eggs are laid in fall.  They incubate until early spring when they hatch.  The fry emerge from their gravel beds and seek out microenvironments to live and grow in.  Wetlands are crucial to trout streams.  They provide spring water, which is cool, clean and well oxygenated.  They provide nurseries for trout. 

The project as proposed by Love’s Travel Stop will amount to a 40 acre development within a stones throw of this delicate ecosystem.  Any habitats health is directly tied to that of its immediate surroundings.  Symbiotic relationships develop between waterways and surrounding areas.  A riparian habitat refers to the buffer zone between any open water and upland areas.  These areas act as filters where vegetation absorbs pollutants and sediment.  They also prevent erosion, and offer shade to the waterways they protect.  This will be compromised by the truck stop.

Love’s proposal will damage this environment through the removal of forest, disturbance of soil, and creation of runoff into the brook.  Runoff from rainwater that falls on asphalt is warm.  It collects gasoline, oil, heavy metals, road salt and silt.  All of these harmful substances will find their way from the proposed truck stop into Roaring Brook.  This will damage the health of the stream. 

The proposed development features construction of a leaching field capable of handling 6,000 gallons per day of wastewater.  This leaching field will be roughly 120 feet from the wetland where Mr. Murphy observed wild brook trout in 2013.  The actual construction of the leaching field will bring development to within twenty feet of the wetland.  It is difficult under any circumstances to believe that measurable damage will not be done to this watershed, my home watershed.  This septic system will adversely affect the water quality of Roaring Brook.

I understand that the town of Willington will benefit from the increased tax revenue that this project will generate, however I cannot support it in light of what it will do to a pristine brook.  I have walked all my life below the forest canopy that shades this brook.  My family and I swim in its cool waters in the height of summer and I have fished it successfully in January snowstorms.  We must protect what native fish remain in our world.  Doing so is the golden rule embodied, doing to others what you would have done to yourself. 

I showed my daughter Marin her first brook trout from Roaring Brook in 2017.  I was thrilled I had caught it since I had again confirmed some few still lived called the brook home.  It was some ancestor of the trout my brother and I had found in a drain pipe all those years before.  This thought struck me: in a drainpipe.  There once were so many trout in these parts that they had permeated the very sewers below our feet.  And now I am thrilled to know that even one still lives in the watershed I so dearly love.

A shadow passed my face when I thought about the now vacant stream where I had caught those first brook trout behind my parent’s house.  It is my hope that my daughter will be able to show her own children some progeny of that fish I showed her, when she was 3 years old.  She will only be able to do this if we fiercely protect this resource.

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains.  You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow.  They smelled of moss in your hand.  Polished and muscular and torsional.  On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming.  Maps and mazes.  Of a thing which could not be put back.  Not be made right again.  In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

                                                                                                        ~From Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road

Please consider standing with me against the damage this project will cause Roaring Brook.

You can help support Roaring Brook by signing the petition to stop the proposed development of Love’s Travel Stop found here.

You can also write directly to the DEEP Hearing Officer to voice your concern: deep.adjudications@ct.gov

There is a public site walk on Monday April 23^rd at 10 a.m. taking place at the Polester Road development site.

There will be a public hearing held on Tuesday April 24^th at the Willington Public Library.  Doors will open at 5:30 p.m. for discussion with a formal presentation to begin at 6:00 p.m.

Lastly, follow Nectar Community on Facebook to stay in the loop about the fight for Roaring Brook and other things happening in eastern CT.

Slump Buster

I dropped the first two fish I hooked in 2017. Both felt heavy and hurt in their own way. One was a northern pike that I lost an arm's length from the ice hole. I never did get a look at her, maybe it was for the better, but by the fight and weight I know it was big enough to be rattled over losing it. 

The other fish wasn't under the ice; it was next to a brush pile in a small stream. I saw the trout's back come out of the water as it crushed my black and olive bugger. I set the hook and she thrashed, spewing my fly ten feet behind me. I let out an "Oh my god. What the F was that?" while the gravity of the situation sunk in. It was definitely another class of fish that I was accustomed to from this stream; something I'd be happy with from the Farmington, yet this was unstocked water a fraction of its size. I was certain it was the largest wild brown I had hooked in more than 15 years of fishing there. That one stung pretty good. I was in a funk to start the new year. 

Cue the January thaw. I went back to the same small stream today during a long lunch at work. The fresh wading boot prints on the snow-packed trail was a punch to my gut. Someone had already fished this stretch today. I blew by some water that I would normally take some casts in to get to the exact lie I pricked the fish from. Along the bank I could see where the angler got into the water and broke shelf ice and stirred up mud. I knew right then that he didn't hook that fish and neither would I this trip. I kept moving upstream and I couldn't escape the fresh prints. I made it to a deep, slow pool screaming to be fished with a woolly bugger. I couldn't get a sniff and to make matters worse, I busted off the streamer on a tree branch, then worked it free with my rod tip, only to lose it for good after it fell to the ground. I walked back downstream dejected. 

Before leaving for work, I had packed two other flies just in case I found myself in a jam like this. Back at the truck, I tied on my bread and butter dry-dropper combo and headed to my Alamo. Work lunch was stretching longer than usual at this point, but for good reason. I needed my first fish of 2017 and to snap out of this mental funk. I approached the honey hole and saw no prints. It was a good feeling knowing my flies would be the first these trout have seen in at least four days since the last snow. And they sure acted like it, too. In quick succession, I landed six trout from the small run. Five browns and a lone brookie, all of which looked healthy and put a bend in my three-weight rod. Each of them took a tiny bead head pheasant tail nymph dropped 18 inches below a stimulator dry fly. This method had worked for me many times in this run and it wasn't going to let me down now. I was on the board for the year and swapped my Muck boots for work shoes and drove back to the office with the smell of fish on my hands. 

We Took To The Woods

Editor's note: This enjoyable post comes from my good friend Aaron Swanson. He and our buddy Tommy recently made a memorable trip to Maine to catch big native brook trout. 

Fishing in Connecticut during the month of May presents the versatile angler with a problem: too many opportunities. Of course, this is a good problem to have – variety as they say, is the spice of life.

Inland streams are flush with hungry salmonoids; many looking up to slurp the first large rusty colored mayflies hatching in the rapidly warming water. Coastal rivers and tidal zones are infused with the first anadromous visitors – some joining their counterparts who stayed the long grey winter.  Post-spawn pike, pre-spawn bass; both brown and green and pre-spawn carp all present varied and exciting prospects – and this abbreviated list would surely have some grumbling for species omitted.  When presented with the virtual piscatorial mayhem at hand in the Constitution State a friend and I made the easiest choice possible:  get away from it all. 

An invite to stay and fish in western Maine is one that – if possible – you don’t turn down. There, in those woods, resides a special population of brook trout, native char that grow large in the cool clean waters far from parking lots and suburban developments. This invitation was extended to us; just as warming temperatures drove the intensity of the local fishing scene to a level nearing combustion. 

The stampede of anglers falling over each other to get their piece of the local action, the prospect of finding ourselves as far away from people and civilization as we could get sounded just about right. As we set out on our six-hour ride, the 91 degree reading on the truck’s thermometer, the crowded roadways packed with Friday afternoon traffic and the sizzling pavement only helped to reaffirm our decision and destination.

The rivers we fished in western Maine (and the large lakes that feed them) harbor the last of an incredible strain of brook trout.  These fish were recognized by turn of the century sportsman to be worth saving. Thanks to foresight and conservation, there are still a handful of waters where trophy quality brook trout can be found stateside. Combining tips and assistance from one of the area’s top guides with fortuitous timing and find them we did.

But the fish aren’t the only reason to visit this special area. The sensory experience of living history helps to transport you away from the everyday grind of reality experienced back home. The complete lack of cell service instantly facilitates a decreased use of electronic devices and we found ourselves refreshingly unplugged. When we got down the logging roads to Forest Lodge we were reminded of the way folks used to live. This opens the eyes to how good and in some ways, bad we have it. 

Sitting on the Aldro’s back porch after one of the best days of fishing of our lives while guests use the wood-fired hot-tub and the river plays the only soundtrack that fits the scene at hand – this provides a kind of therapy found nowhere else.

We were invited to dinner, to sit in a rustic country kitchen where people have sat for more than a century. We enjoyed a fine meal around the table with a dozen friends, none of whom we had ever met.  That is to fully experience a place where history was chronicled and written and that is a feeling that will take you a million miles away – even if you do have to do the dishes as compensation for your meal…

              

Special thanks go to Dan Thrall of Rx Outdoors for hosting, sharing his immense knowledge of the local area and being an all-around good guy! Thanks to Rufus too...

Wild Homecoming

An old friend of mine is home after a long time away. We fished together yesterday morning on a small wild trout stream that we used to frequent before he left. I could tell Matt was excited to be back, soaking it all in and taking photos of anything that moved. A few hours along a picturesque wooded stream on a brisk fall day must have crossed his mind more than once while floating in an aircraft carrier halfway across the globe. I'm glad it was me who he fished with first after not picking up a rod for a whole year (see our last trip here).

Everything was just how we left it except that the stream was scary low. Thankfully, as I type this a day later, the whole state of Connecticut is receiving a much needed soaking. The wild trout we found holed up together in a couple pools will be grateful to spread out again.

Matt started us off right by getting three strikes on his first three drifts with a dry fly and weighted nymph underneath it. On the third take, he connected with a trout much bigger than the first two. It darted around the pool and wouldn't quit, especially when it saw my net dip below the surface. When he finally subdued, Matt and I were in high spirits realizing it was biggest trout we'd seen from this stream in a couple seasons; an old male brown with deep, dark colors.

We let that pool rest and took a long walk through the woods, stopping where we thought any trout could be lurking. On this day, we did more walking than usual because some of the normal stops didn't seem worth it in the low flow. It was pretty sad to see the mystery taken out of once-deep pools. A silver lining to the lack of water was that it allowed us to scout a stretch we often don't make it to –what is probably very promising water under optimal conditions.

After a crouching and casting for a few hours, we eventually wandered back to the pool where our day began. Like it was the first meal they'd seen in weeks, little trout were fighting over flies drifted down the center of the run. I got smacked first by a little native brookie, then again by another gem of a brown. They preferred a small pheasant tail pattern with a tungsten bead, but more than one came up for the bushy dry fly on top.

It was a very enjoyable morning on the water and I look forward to many more like it with my buddy that's now moved back home for the next few years. Sometimes I take for granted the wonderful fishing I have at my disposal in Connecticut, but yesterday was a good reminder not to.