Friday, January 28, 2011
A lifetime on the water
Fisheries biologist Bud LaRoche hopes to spend his free time fishing for fun --something he didn't get a lot of time to do before.
The Roanoke Times | File 2009
Bud LaRoche always jumped at the chance to work in the field, such as this fish sampling mission at Carvins Cove.
Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times
Bud LaRoche, a biologist with the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, recently retired after 30 years of service. As the fisheries supervisor for the Roanoke region, LaRoche had plenty of office responsibilities, but often could be found on the water helping his team collect fish.
Mark Taylor is outdoors editor at The Roanoke Times.
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There is a certain aroma that bothers Janet Scheid.
"The smell of fish drives me nuts," said Scheid, the recently retired greenways coordinator for Roanoke County.
And that smell was one she hasn't been able to avoid.
Sheid's husband, Bud LaRoche, had his hands in fish a lot.
For more than 30 years.
"I used to try to find all kinds of soap to get the smell off his hands," Scheid said, with a laugh. "I use to say, 'You smell like fish.' And he'd say, 'Well, I just took a shower.'"
Sheid's finally getting a break.
LaRoche, the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries biologist who oversaw fisheries management in the Roanoke region, retired at the end of 2010.
During his more than 20 years of working in the region, LaRoche had his hands in many meaty fish stories, including investigations into mysterious fish kills, major changes in regulations and trends, and the massive responsibility of serving as the DGIF's point man on the re-licensing of Smith Mountain Lake's dam.
"It's been great," said LaRoche, who just turned 59 and who spent 30 years with the DGIF. "I've seen so many beautiful sunsets and sunrises, given a lot of talks to kids.
"You don't make a lot of money, but it's a pretty stress-free job."
Not that the job didn't have plenty of challenges.
LaRoche has been heavily involved in investigations of fish kills, such as the striped bass kill at Smith Mountain Lake in 2003, and the ongoing fish kills on the James River and its tributaries that started a few years ago.
Smith Mountain Lake's stripers, in general, have commanded a lot of attention.
When LaRoche started working in the region in the late 1980s, back when the DGIF still had a small district office in Vinton, the once-phenomenal striper fishery at Smith Mountain Lake was in bad shape.
"During the '80s the lake was in severe decline," LaRoche said.
Ironically, the construction of a new sewage treatment facility on the Roanoke River was a key reason.
"That took a lot of the nutrients out of the lake," said LaRoche, who was careful to add that cleaning up the Roanoke River was ultimately a good thing.
Pre-sewage treatment plant, LaRoche said there were an estimated 1,000 pounds of shad per acre parts of the lake. That number plummeted to 150 to 200 pounds per acre when the water was cleaned up.
The drop in forage had a huge impact on the growth rates of predators, including stripers.
"Without the baitfish, everything declined," said LaRoche, who had to convince fishermen that reducing striper stockings was necessary. "Getting that turned around was one of our biggest challenges."
LaRoche and his team had help, including from citizens.
Through the years, volunteers, many from the Smith Mountain Striper Club, helped the DGIF with striper efforts including annual stockings, and maintaining catch logs to help track survival and growth rates.
Anglers also helped with other efforts, including the one that helped get more than two miles of the Roanoke River in Roanoke County and Salem designated as Delayed Harvest trout fishing water.
That couldn't have happened had members of the Roanoke chapter of Trout Unlimited not personally cleared the idea with multiple riverside landowners, an effort that they also brought former Salem mayor Sonny Tarpley into.
"It's fun to work with groups and see quality come out of it," LaRoche said.
The son of a Marine, LaRoche moved around quite a few times as a young child before the family landed in Northern Virginia. There he grew to love the outdoors.
"My dad never hunted or fished, but all the kids in the neighborhood fished," he recalled.
A forestry and wildlife major at Virginia Tech, he worked as a part-time technician for the DGIF for a couple of summers during college.
After graduating he went to work full-time as a DGIF fisheries technician, a job he held until he and Scheid headed back to Tech for grad school.
"I quit my job, got married and moved back to Tech in the same week," he said.
He and Scheid finished school the same time, too, turning in their theses the same day.
After a short stint with Trout Unlimited, LaRoche got a biologists job with the DGIF, working in the Kerr Reservoir area.
He was there until moving to the Roanoke region as the region's fisheries manager in 1987.
Biologist Scott Smith started at the Forest Office shortly after.
"You couldn't ask for a better boss," said Smith, the region's rivers biologist. "He was there if you needed him ... but the assumption was that we knew what we were doing and how we were supposed to do it, so he let us do it."
Smith said LaRoche was always willing to get out in the field.
One of those field trips resulted in one of LaRoche's hairiest moments on the job.
During an electroshocking mission on the Rappahannock River, LaRoche was wading and helping guide a boat through a shallow section of the river. An inexperienced technician stepped back into the boat and onto the mat that closed the circuit to the shocking pole.
"It locked me up tight," said LaRoche, who had to be yanked out of the water by biologist John Odenkirk. "He was looking at me yelling, 'Talk to me! Talk to me!"
"It really didn't hurt."
LaRoche didn't tell his wife when he talked to her on the phone that night. When he got back to Vinton after the trip and let her know, she made him go to the doctor for a check up.
"There was a nurse in the room and as she walked out and went down the hall I could hear her say, 'You're not going to believe this one,'" remembered LaRoche, who checked out fine.
A more typical hazard of the job was having to discuss proposed fisheries regulations with concerned citizens, some of whom showed up soused for public meetings.
And, of course, there was the stench.
"In this business, when you get done with a day on the job, you smell like fish, sweat and gasoline," Smith said. "They don't make a cologne like that."
Now that they're retired, LaRoche and Scheid, whose son Colby is a 20-year-old college student, plan to do some volunteering, for groups such as the Western Virginia Land Trust.
LaRoche hopes he actually gets to do some fishing for fun. That's something he, perhaps surprisingly, didn't get to do much of during his career.
"I'd like to try do some muskie fishing," he said.
Scheid will be OK with that. Muskies are pretty hard to catch, so LaRoche probably won't come home smelling bad too often.
