Thirty-five years ago, before I fished the Batten Kill for the first time, I asked a friend his impressions of the river. "It runs cold all summer," he said, "and fish sip little stuff all day long. Lots of brook trout and small browns." A few years later I moved to southern Vermont, and in some seasons spent five or six nights a week (and sometimes all day) on the river. I've seen a lot of changes over the years.

The Batten Kill was one of the last sizable Eastern rivers outside of Maine to hold healthy populations of wild brook trout. That hasn't changed much over 30 years. What has declined is the brown trout population, which runs contrary to what you might expect, as brown trout are normally more tolerant of increased water temperatures, moderate pollution, and angling pressure.

In the early 1970s, you could count on catching 15 or 20 wild trout during a good Hendrickson hatch. Most of them would be 8- to 11-inch brown trout, with a few brookies mixed in. If you were lucky, you might tie into a 15-inch monster brown. The river was under Vermont general regulations--12 fish of any size--and was heavily fished. But despite heavy harvesting, the trout population seemed to hold up just fine.

Early Inklings of a Problem
The river was full of trout of all sizes when I started fishing it, and continued to fish well until the early 1990s. By 1995, small brown trout had vanished, and as a result most people caught fewer fish. At first I thought it was just me--you go out on the river a few times and you don't see or hook any fish, you just shrug your shoulders. Brown trout are moody and sometimes they just don't feed.

One bright day in May, with perfect water levels, 55-degree F. water, and a heavy Hendrickson hatch, I learned something was seriously wrong. For two hours I stared holes in the water without seeing a single rise. This was on the "lower river," downstream of where it meets the town of Arlington, makes a right-hand turn to the west, and changes from a slow, deep, brushy stream to a more open, riffle-and-pool river.

So I decided to try the upstream areas, long the home of large brown trout suckered from their deep holes by night crawlers in the middle of the night. The water here is slow and deep and the banks are tangled, so it doesn't get much fly-fishing pressure.

What I found there was both exciting and dreadful. I had to spend hours looking for a rising fish, but when I found one, it was very large for this river. Over the next few years, I took several brown trout over 20 inches, and one amazing fish of about 23 inches. But I never saw a brown trout less than 15 inches long. I think those big fish were always present, but when you step into a pool of a dozen rising fish you get careless, and I suspect that the bigger trout were slinking into cover while we caught the smaller fish that weren't as spooky.

It wasn't just my imagination or lack of fishing skills. By 1994, through careful and deliberate study of electroshocking data, Ken Cox, Vermont district biologist in charge of the Batten Kill, had determined that the number of brown trout greater than 6 inches long had declined 64 percent since 1988. This was doubly unfortunate because for five years the state had enacted slot-limit regulations on a 2-mile stretch of river. The slot-limit area showed a 45-percent decline in total trout abundance that was not statistically different from the areas of river left under general regulations.

What happened to the brown trout? Have they come back? Is it still worth fishing?

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Tom Rosenbauer is the marketing director of Orvis Rod & Tackle in Sunderland, Vermont. He is the author of the newly updated Orvis Fly Fishing Guide (The Lyons press, 2007).

This article originally appeared in the July 2007 issue of Fly Fisherman.

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