March 4, 2022 – A Couple Hours Chasing the Fresh Stockers – SEPA DHALO

Not a wet sock, at least not this one.

Once a defender of stocking programs and the fish themselves, I am beginning to understand more clearly the other side of the argument too.  I still have love for those wily enough to hold over and wild out.   Living where I live, too, stocking provides more fishing experiences than Valley Creek, which is hardly big enough or challenging enough alone to sustain me when I don’t want to travel far.  I respect wild browns for their now generational survival skills, so I concur with my boy Reelin Ron that those first generation survivors, like rogue rainbows and long-ranging brownies, deserve some respect too.  To go from ceeement pond to the mighty Lehigh River and thrive, that is something worth celebrating in a stocker, and a small percentage of them do have the right stuff.  But there is the other side, too.  People privately stock streams because they can’t catch enough wild fish for their liking or skill level, for example.  More personally, I feel like a fraud standing there with my 600 dollar waders, 250 dollar boots, 150 dollar net, and so on watching former bucketmates chasing each other around a muddy hole in a creek that may have no business hosting a trout—or worse, wild fish potentially exhausting themselves chasing ignorant stockers out of their prime generational real estate holdings.  This is probably happening in a few Lehigh Valley limestoners—in particular, one with a very “porous” hatchery nearby—at this very moment!

"I'm a franchise player and we're out here talking about stockers?  Stockers?" - AI

This creek I fished today is not that bad—hence it’s been given the small privilege of being a DHALO.  It does have very decent bug life and even a wild fish or two—they are even trying to reintroduce natives in the headwaters of a couple of these particularly clean creeks in SEPA.  Like many a crick in the region, Ida effed this one up pretty bad, however, so a couple times I was fishing muddy, nondescript holes just to land fish that I could see in there when much of the rest of the creek was barren.  I don’t know the particular date, just that the stocking was done last week, so perhaps we just need a rain to spread them out.  I saw some adult stoneflies today, too, so I did tell Eric I would sneak over here again this month for some dry fly action, but the overall experience today felt off.  Perhaps it was the aforementioned lazy planting of fish, or the fact that with the exception of one fish that may have survived the year they fought like wet socks, or maybe it was all the flies and tippet and thingamabobbers laced through one particular deadfall in water too deep to retrieve one’s errors safely. Whatever the case, I don’t think I want to chase stockers again anytime soon, at least not until they get a chance to acclimate and let survival instincts and genetics begin to work their combined magic.

Oh, Ida....