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Trout season opens

It’s a sunny afternoon March 7. A cold breeze and recent rain has made Ridley Creek’s water murky and current quick. Volunteers trample their way through brush and trees down to the creek side to dump large white buckets of trout into their new home.

Once their buckets are empty, a few of the volunteers stand and watch as the trout adapt to the cold water and eventually swim away.

Philip Ewaka, the fish stocking coordinator for Delaware County who has been doing this for 30 years, noted that each truck carries about 15,000 trout.

A ll 15,000 trout are scooped out of the tanks by a net and emptied into a bucket. Volunteers spend several hours dumping out each bucket one at a time.

Once the fish are free, they soon disappear into the dark water. But trout season opens April 2, and soon anglers will swarm the creek in search of the biggest catch.

On the morning of April 2, at approximately 8 a.m., Delaware County fishermen are allowed to cast their lines and try to hook their first trout of the year.

“Opening day of trout season [is] probably one of the busiest days of the year for us fishing-wise,” said Waterways Conservation Officer Ron Evancho. “We’ll be out there early in the morning [at] 8 o’clock to make sure nobody’s trying [to] cheat.”

According to the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, Adams, Berks, Bucks, Chester, Cumberland, Dauphin, Delaware, Franklin, Juniata, Lancaster, Lebanon, Lehigh, Montgomery, Northampton, Perry, Philadelphia, Schuylkill and York Counties all have early openers.

For the rest of the state, however, the season starts April 16.

Pennsylvania streams and lakes are stocked with nearly four million trout. The three kinds of trout being released are brown, brook, and rainbow trout.

The brook trout is Pennsylvania’s state fish and, according to Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, the state record is a seven pound brook, caught in 1996.

The trout being distributed in Delaware County are raised in Huntsdale hatchery in Carlisle, Pa. which is a two and a half hour truck ride for the fish to Media, Pa. in large temperature controlled tanks.

In Delaware County there are three approved trout streams: Ridley Creek, Chester Creek, and Darby Creek. Each creek has an area, from one designated point to another that makes up the approved trout streams. These runs are stocked preseason and in season.

The Ridley Creek approved trout stream runs from the Delaware River near Chester, Pa. up to Ridley Creek State Park and eventually tapers off at the Delaware Chester county line.

The Chester Creek approved trout stream starts off of Bridgewater Road in Brookhaven, Pa. It travels westward and eventually splits after it crosses Hollow Hill Road in Middletown, Pa.

It then becomes Chester Creek and West Branch Chester Creek and, just like Ridley Creek, they both run to the county line and stop.

The third and final approved trout stream, Darby Creek, starts at Shrigley Park in Lansdowne, Pa. It flows northward until it splits close to Darby Road and Sproul Road, and then becomes Little Darby Creek and Ithan Creek.

Marcus Peterson, 33, a DCCC communications major, is a fly fisherman and offers an interesting insight into opening day. Peterson explained that “bait dunkers” are non-fly fishermen who fish with a worm.

“I’m actually more fearful for when trout season opens because then we have more people out there that are bait dunking, and most of the time bait dunkers don’t release their fish,” Peterson said.

To keep ones trout it must be seven inches, and there is a daily limit of five combined species, according to the PFBC.

Prior to the opener on April 2, the PFBC will be conducting roughly nine stocking events and volunteers are always welcomed. All the dates of preseason and in season stockings can be found on http://www.fishandboat.com.

Contact Bill Goldhahn at communitarian@mail.dccc.edu

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