Friday, September 15, 2006
Clearwater revival
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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PULASKI -- Jason Steele was tired and sweaty, but he felt good.
Along with a dozen other members of the New River Valley chapter of Trout Unlimited, Steele spent Saturday morning doing stream restoration work in Peak Creek, a small tributary of the New River that gets its start just outside this town.
In a few weeks, the stream -- a new addition to the state's delayed harvest trout program -- will be teaming with freshly stocked rainbows and browns.
But Steele said he might not return until it's time for more work.
"I'll probably never fish this area," said Steele, a Virginia Tech graduate student.
Steele said his concern was for the greater good, not himself.
Chuck Harrell, another Tech graduate student and the treasurer of the TU chapter, nodded.
"We joke about it and say the locals may come down here and fish it out," Harrell said. "But who cares?
"It's getting them out."
Saturday morning, the crew installed 23 cover logs in the section of the stream adjacent to Heritage Park. Installed at an angle atop spacer blocks, the logs will give the trout a place to hide, something missing in the natural streambed in this stretch.
"In areas that are deeper, water acts as cover," Ryan McManamay, the chapter's president, said as he stood shin-deep in a long, flat stretch of stream. "You can see how shallow it is here, and that there is no cover."
Stocked trout will gravitate to the cover, said Joe Williams, a Department of Game and Inland Fisheries biologist who works out of the agency's Blacksburg office.
The cover logs were a good option for the project.
"This is a real easy, cheap way of putting cover into the stream," Williams said.
This was the TU crew's second day of work on Peak Creak. Earlier this year members spent a day pulling trash from the stream and its banks.
"We pulled out everything from a motorcyle to a shopping cart to tires," said Phil Taylor, the club's conservation director.
Taylor was among the trout angler conservationists who helped revive the New River Valley chapter of TU this past winter. The club had been inactive in recent years. Many of the members are Tech students, and several are part of the school's Stream Team, a group interested in stream ecology.
Shortly after their early meetings, the group's leaders approached Williams, seeking his input on potential conservation projects.
Williams immediately thought of Peak Creek, which had already been designated to be added to the Delayed Harvest program.
Delayed harvest streams offer a compromise between year-round fishing and put-and-take waters. They are stocked three times between Oct. 1 and May 31. During that period, anglers are required to use artificial lures and must release all trout. The waters, most of which would be unable to support trout through the summer, open to harvest June 1.
After the clean-up effort, Williams supplied the club with rough cut half-logs, spacer blocks, and rebar for anchoring the wood to the streambed.
"They are really gung ho," Williams said of the TU volunteers.
Saturday morning, it took the 13 volunteers about three hours of serious effort to carry the logs to the stream, select good locations and anchor the logs.
Twelve-year-old Natasha Cruise of Pembroke had a couple of jobs.
"I took pictures, and also stood on the logs while they hammered them in," said a smiling Natasha, who was with her father, Allen Cruise.
Allen Cruise said he prefers to fish for wild trout, but he planned to bring Natasha and her brother back for some fishing once the stream is stocked.
"This will be great for the kids," Cruise said. Another section of Peak Creek has also been identified as requiring some stream improvements, Williams said.
Where the stream runs through the town, the banks are actually rock walls and the streambed is almost completely devoid of cover. The only areas even marginally suited for trout are under the several bridges that cross the stream, so those are the only areas that will be stocked.
A game department stream restoration specialist is currently developing a plan for improving the habitat in that area. The project has the potential to be complex and costly, Williams said.
Taylor said the TU chapter is already looking for another project, but that doesn't mean the volunteers will ignore Peak Creek.
There will probably be a second round of installing cover logs, along with more clean-up days.
"The idea is," Taylor said, "that this is going to be an on-going project."
