Fish Truck!
So, it looks like I did not post about going to see the fish stocking last week, so I am going to post about it now, because it was cool!
Here is the quarry:
A nice little body of water where they used to dig, I believe, limestone. It's one of our stocked trout fishing areas for the county, and also there's a bunch of other stuff in there. They were stocking it at 11 AM on the day that I work nearby, so went in early and took a long lunch to go check it out.
Here is the Fish Truck. They have bigger ones, but this pond was only getting 300 of the 3.2 million trout being stocked across the state, so we got the small truck. The silvery-gray box is full of fish, and a lot less water than you would think. (The hatchery is only about two, two and a half hours away.) On the side there, you can see the Fish Hose, which can be used to shoot the fish out into the water. However, since it was a small amount of fish and a crowd had gathered, they opted for a lower-tech method.
Here, the Fish and Boat man, in his ceremonial hi-viz, opens the tank and begins to scoop the fish.
Buckets are half-filled with water, and then filled with fish.
Sometimes, a fish flops out between bucket and net.
Bystanders quickly hand-carry the escapees the last few steps to the water.
The children were first in line to take the buckets of fish and pour them in the water, but the rest of us got to do some, too. I got two, including this allotment's only Golden Trout.
These are not golden-trout-the-species, but a pale color morph of rainbow trout that appeared in a West Virginia hatchery some time ago, locally known as "palominos." They make up about one-half of one percent of the state's stocked trout; anglers like them for the rarity value, and because the state tends to release them at a much bigger size than the regular ones--the one at our stocking barely fit in the bucket. (Their coloration makes them a lot more visible to natural predators; my guess is that they keep them at the hatchery until they're too big for most of the fish-eating critters we have around here, so that anglers have a chance at them.)
