Electrofishing... Trout Day style!!!

[hanson]

Trout Day V has come and gone. For those of you who missed out, Trout Day is an annual event held at Forestville Mystery Cave State Park in southern Minnesota. This years Trout Day happened to be held on Saturday, April 30. Jim Wernimont of FM and a cast of volunteers do a great job of organizing and running the event.

To catch up on what happened at Trout Day, check out this thread- 5th Annual Trout Day

Besides catching some trout, one of the highlights for myself was watching 2 members of the DNR demonstrate how they electroshock the streams to conduct their creel counts. I've personally never witnessed this before and it was quite fascinating.

Small stream electrofishing equipment consisted of a backpack with a battery & transformer connected to a wand with a positive electrode and a flat disc that floats in the water with a negative electrode. When the pack is turned on, current flows through the water between the electrodes and causes the trout to swim towards the wand. You then use a net to scoop up the fish and place them in a bucket. The one DNR guy does the 'fishing' and the other gets to carry the fish in the bucket. The current doesn't cause the fish to go belly up as I previously thought but causes them to swim towards the source of the current where they are easily netted. Once in the bucket, they appear fine & healthy.

During the demonstration, all the kids watched on with excitement as 4 trout were sampled from our location. A couple of them were pretty nice. One thing the DNR explained to us was this sampling was typical of what they'd been finding so far and that was fewer trout from previous years.

Here is the crowd of kids & Boy Scouts anxiously waiting to see some trout.

Here are the 2 members of the DNR Lanesboro office in the water doing a little electrofishing.

Here is one of the Brown Trout being scooped up.

Here is the DNR holding up one of the Brown Trout. The kids were all fascinated by the fish and wanted to touch it! It was hard to get good photos once the mob of kids got in to take a look at the fish! They had a good time!

And finally, here's a photo of fellow FMer Renneberg and a nice brown trout.

This trout was very typical of the trout we caught that afternoon. I would conservatively estimate 40 or so brown trout caught by the 2 of us. And YES!, that is a rather large floating Rapala in the trouts mouth. Man, do they smack those baits hard!

For those who missed out, I would recommend bringing the kids next year. If you are a big kid like myself and want to learn about troutfishing (spinning or flyfishing), this would be a great opportunity for you.

[Lost]

Looks like it was a lot of fun!

How do they know where to put the electrodes to get the fish to swim to it?

[Captain B.R.K]

It would be fun to see the DNR do an electro shock of a stream that has some real lunkers. Probably won't make me feel better they are there because with my chances->they'll never bite my hook

[hanson]

Lost-

The DNR just walks up and down the stream with the electrode in the water moving it around. If there are trout near, they swim right to it! Crazy!

Of course certain areas of the stream are going to be better for holding fish than others such as holes, undercut banks, etc.

The area to the right of the DNR is part of a stream that has been restored and there is a manmade crib structure under the rocks that forms an undercut bank. It was probably 2' deep under the rocks and went under the bank 2' or so. Pretty cool stuff.

BRK- The DNR had a piece on Minnesota Bound with Ron Schara on the Vermilion River. They were shocking the stream and there were definitely some lunker brown trout that came to the surface!

[Captain B.R.K]

I don't know if I saw that clip, but I did do some reading!! Would love to fish that some day.