Thursday, December 24, 2009
Bill Cochran's Outdoors: Revamped hatchery has trout swimming in circles
Bill Cochran is a Roanoke Times outdoors columnist.
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The Coursey Springs Fish Cultural Station in Bath County should be back online in March, following a $13.5 million renovation that has transformed the aging 1960's trout operation into a state-of-the-art fish factory. The result should be obvious to trout anglers -- more fish and bigger fish for the streams and impoundments stocked as part of the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries trout program.
“I feel like trout fishermen in Virginia got an early Christmas present,” Bob Duncan, said last week at the dedication of the facility. He is the executive director of the DGIF.
The past couple of seasons have been Scrooge years for trout anglers, as the shutdown of Coursey Springs for renovation lowered the number and quality of trout stocked. Overall, annual trout stockings are down by 300,000, said Gary Martel, who managed Coursey Springs from 1983 through 1990, before becoming head of the DGIF fisheries department.
“Believe me, trout fishermen recognize when you stock fewer fish,” Martel said. “Next October, they should see a significant difference.”
Already seeing a difference are the predators that once made a feast of trout in the hatchery. The new project has locked them out, with most of the facility under roof and behind chain-link fencing.
“If you look around you will find that the birds aren’t half as fat as they used to be,” joked Sherry Crumely, of Buchanan, DGIF board member whose district includes the hatchery.
Truth is, a major motivation for revamping the facility was loss of trout to predation. About half of the fish produced in the hatchery were being gobbled up by a variety of predators, mostly the avian kind, officials said.
As bad as that was, even more pressing was concern over the poor quality of water being discharges from the hatchery into Spring Run and, eventually, into the Cowpasture River. It was so bad that it had attracted the attention of environmental officials who had flagged Spring Run as being “impaired.”
Under the new operation, plans call for sending the water out of the hatchery cleaner than it was when in came in.
The heart of the hatchery is the massive spring itself, which turns out up to 12,000-gallons per minute, ranking it one of the top three springs in the state. It has been covered to protect it from vegetation and other undesirable influences.
Gone are the raceways that once held trout. They have been replaced by 40 stainless steel, circular tanks located under two pavilions covered with an environmental pleasing green roof. The larger pavilion is nearly the length of two football fields and is where adult trout will be kept in 40-foot tanks. One tank can hold 23,000 10- to 12-inch trout. Smaller trout will be held in 20-foot tanks. Fish for the hatchery are expected to arrive from other hatcheries in March.
When held in raceways, trout tend to gather in thick, black pods, but that won’t be the case in circular tanks, said Ron Southwick, DGIF assistant fish chief. They will swim evenly against the current, better utilizing the water capacity, he said. Production should increase from 165,000 to 350,000 pounds per year. That means approximately 450,000 catchable-size trout, including rainbows, browns and brooks, can be produced annually.
License fees covered just over $10 million of the project’s price tag, the rest came from federal sources. Duncan called it “the largest capital project our department has ever undertaken.”
Yet to be constructed are solar panels to be placed on the roof of the pavilions to generate power. This three-quarters of a million dollars addition is to be funded by the Obama stimulus package.
Plans call for revamping Spring Run, immediately below the hatchery, turning it into a first-rate fishery by making it narrower and deeper and enhancing it with 40 habitat structures. Officials haven’t decided what special regulations will be in place.
See Cochran Field Reports (“Strange time for a dedication”)
Bill Cochran
Coursey Springs dedication day.
