Early Inklings of a Problem | Current Issues | The Flotillas | The Plan | Fishing the Batten Kill

The Flotillas
Thirty years ago, you might see one or two canoes a season on the Batten Kill. In the 1980s, a couple of commercial canoe liveries began summer operations, and soon people started floating down the river on inner tubes. Both are the scapegoats anglers love to hate because they compete with "our" space on the river.

I'm convinced that the flotillas have changed the feeding behavior of the trout, as you seldom see the pods of fish surface feeding in the middle of the day that were so common decades ago. There have also been numerous reports of floaters cutting branches that obstruct the flow of the river, contributing to a loss of overhead cover.

Mergansers, large fish-eating waterfowl that swim extremely well and often hunt in flocks, were virtually absent on the Batten Kill until about 15 years ago. I suspect that mergansers like this river because its smooth, shallow flows make herding and hunting their prey easier, and fish-eating bird populations all over have rebounded after the national ban on DDT.

A study of both merganser and large brown trout stomach contents on the Batten Kill in summer 2003 showed 2-inch-long trout in only 2 of the 39 brown trout sampled, but of 26 merganser stomachs sampled, 4 had fish in them and all were yearling trout. Mergansers seem to select the same size range that is missing in the Batten Kill brown trout population--fish from 6 to 10 inches long.

Fishing pressure does not seem to have been a factor in the decline of the river's brown trout. During the great fishing of the 1970s, the river was under general Vermont trout regulations of 12 fish of any size per day.

Fishing intensity before the 1990s was not as heavy as on popular rivers like the Beaverkill, Penn's Creek, or the Bighorn, but during the Hendrickson hatch you had to get there early to get a good pool, and sometimes had to share a pool with other anglers. But from 1988 to 1992, fishing traffic decreased by 37 percent and the trout catch rate decreased by 55 percent. In 1988 it took the average angler an hour and 45 minutes to catch one trout; by 1992 you needed to spend more than two hours. The word soon got around, and in a few years the river was almost empty on weekdays, with light pressure on weekends.