http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2013304270012If you haven’t bought your fishing license yet — or taken a youngster fishing — you might want to do so soon. Fishing season has been underway for awhile now, but over the next week or so it promises to really bust wide open.
Warming water temperatures is one reason why. The bass fishing on Lake Champlain, for example, is about to get very hot as inshore waters warm. But it also has a lot to do with Saturday’s opener of what should be a very good walleye season and the onset next week of full-bore stocking of the state’s popular trophy trout waters.
State fisheries biologists finished up their walleye sampling Wednesday on the Missisquoi River in Swanton, where they also collected brood stock for the Grand Isle hatchery. What they found bodes well for walleye anglers.
“We saw a lot of fish, including plenty of legal (18 inches and longer) fish,” said state fisheries biologist Bernie Pientka. “We also saw a lot of younger age classes: 2-, 3- and 4-year-old fish that were just barely legal. A lot more than we normally see, which is encouraging.”
Pientka added that the fish came in “all of a sudden” earlier in the week, and most of the hens had yet to spawn.
“I think we’re a little later (this spring) than a normal year,” Pientka. “There should still be a lot of spawning females in the rivers when the season opens and plenty of males around.”
Biologists were also impressed with the condition of many of the males they handled. They were so fat and healthy, Pientka said, they could have easily been mistaken for gravid hens.
Big, beautiful fish are what draws anglers to Vermont’s seven trophy trout sections, which collectively cover almost 26 miles of river and stream.
Although the trophy trout sections on the Otter Creek below Danby and
the Lamoille River below Fairfax Dam have already received preliminary stockings, the bulk of the 8,400 trophy browns and rainbows slated to be stocked in rivers this year will go out starting Tuesday. Only the trophy trout section on the Winooski River in Waterbury will not have been stocked by next weekend; it’s slated to receive its first stocking of 2-year-old browns and rainbows May 6.
