Sunday, March 05, 2006
Better days ahead for trout on Smith
Mark Taylor is outdoors editor at The Roanoke Times.
mark.taylor
@roanoke.com
981-3395
Mark Taylor
Outdoors coverage
- Outdoors commentary: Many Sunday hunting cons
- Winter tourneys invite fishermen out in the cold
- Demand up for boating safety classes
- Visit our Outdoors page
The Wild Life blog
For years fishermen have been grumbling about the decline of the Smith River's trout fishery.
Recently that grumbling has made way to organized activism, and it appears to be paying off. Progress has been made to aid the river's wild brown trout, and the effort is gaining momentum.
More than 50 Smith River stakeholders crowded into a banquet room at Rania's Italian Restaurant in Martinsville on Thursday night to discuss the river's past, present and future.
They displayed passion, reason and patience, traits they will need in the coming years.
Shane Pinkston and Al Kittredge, the respective president and vice president of the Smith River chapter of Trout Unlimited, organized the meeting, managing to pull together a remarkable cross section of key players.
The sheer number of those players is one of the key challenges of managing the Smith River.
The Army Corps of Engineers owns the dam and reservoir that feeds the river. Dominion Power handles the electricity generated by the dam's turbines. The Department of Game and Inland Fisheries manages the river's fishery. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service worries about endangered species in the system. City government and tourism officials focus on the river's potential value in quality of life terms.
Fishermen? They just want to catch trout, the more and bigger the better.
Once, they did.
In the not too distant past the Smith River between Philpott Dam and Martinsville was a remarkable trout stream. Stocked brown trout had taken hold in the river and began to reproduce on their own. Benefitting from a slurry of ground-up forage fish that washed through the dam's turbines, the trout grew fat in the cold water. Ten-pounders weren't uncommon, and the river even produced an 18-pound brown that remains Virginia's record for the species.
Then, things started going downhill.
Biologist Scott Smith was blunt in his assessment of the river.
Brown trout in the Smith River grow slower than in any other stream in Virginia, Smith said. And few fish live longer than six years.
"If they grow slow and they don't live long, that's not a good combination," Smith said.
Since 1999, the river has produced only one registered citation of a brown trout that weighed at least 5 pounds.
Virginia Tech fisheries professor Don Orth headed a long-term research project that tried to determine what was wrong with the river.
Going into the project he thought it could have been as simple as a temperature issue. At one extreme, the water coming out of the dam is 46 degrees, too cold for decent trout growth. Yet because the dam rarely generates on weekends, the downstream temperature can exceed acceptable limits for trout on warm summer days.
Orth's research turned up other problems.
One was the extreme variations in flow. The river runs at barely a trickle when the dam isn't generating. When both turbines are operating, the stream turns into a roaring cauldron. That rushing water scours the river bottom of life in the upper reaches of the tailwater. Hammered as they are, the river banks are devoid of vegetation and erosion is sever. That silt builds up in the river's lower reaches, suffocating life on the river's bottom.
In a perfect world, flows would be moderated and efforts would be made to increase the discharge temperature.
If creating a blue ribbon trout stream was the primary purpose of the dam, making those changes might be more viable.
But trout fishing is actually a pretty small player.
The dam's primary functions are to provide flood control and power generation. The wild card is the existence of endangered Roanoke log perch in the system. Changes won't be allowed if they threaten the perch.
The team effort approach to the Smith has already led to the implementation of one improvement. Starting last year, the turbines are opened one at a time to reduce the initial, damaging surge of downstream flow.
The next goal is to implement at least a short period of weekend generation during the summer to help keep downstream temperatures low. Dominion agreed to pay the estimated $10,000 to $20,000 cost, but the change can't be implemented until assurances are made that log perch won't be adversely affected. Officials left Thursday's meeting thinking that they will probably be able to nail down supporting scientific proof to support that change by this summer.
As for the big fixes that are probably required if the Smith is to ever regain its stature as one of the East's best trout streams, they will be more difficult to attain.
Corps officials have estimated the cost of studying changes to the project at $2 million, a cost that must be shared by the Corps and Virginia.
So this thing has a long way to go.
It has a better chance of getting done with all those key players helping it along.
