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  • Alan Heft, a Maryland Department of Natural Resources fisheries biologist, records weights and lengths of trout captured from the lower Savage River Tuesday morning as a crew with electrofishing gear searches for more fish. Michael A. Sawyers/Times-News

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  • This brown trout was among the many captured, weighed, measured and returned to the lower Savage River Tuesday morning. Michael A. Sawyers/Times-News

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July 21, 2010

Trout in ‘great shape’ after reservoir draining

Savage River fish count impresses biologists

Michael A. Sawyers Cumberland Times-News

— BLOOMINGTON — The trout in the lower Savage River have survived this past winter’s draining of the upstream reservoir with flying colors, mostly a golden olive with red and black spots.

“There is no way I expected the trout to be in such great shape after what they went through,” said Alan Klotz, a Maryland Department of Natural Resources fisheries biologist, as he and a crew of 20 stood knee-deep in the 60-degree water Tuesday morning.

This past winter, the Savage River Reservoir was drained so that faulty release gates could be repaired. That work put the downstream trophy trout fishery at risk, exposing it not only to extremely high flows, but to sediment that stacked as high as three feet in places.

Tuesday was day two of a three-day survey of the lower Savage. A crew used a portable generator to power electrodes that sent a shock through the water, stunning the brown, brook and occasional rainbow trout.

The trout were netted and then sedated so that they could be measured and weighed. After a few minutes for recovery, the fish were distributed back through the same area from whence they came.

“On Monday we shocked the fly-fishing-only area and what we found was impressive,” Klotz said.

Alan Heft, also an agency fisheries biologist, said he would have been happy if the crew found that 10 percent of the trout from a year ago remained, but the news was much better.

“In one mile we sampled 862 trout and that’s 70 percent of what was there last year,” Klotz said.

Ninety percent of the trout were the olive-sided browns. A substantial number were 12 to 16 inches, making them 3- to 5-year-old fish. The remaining 10 percent were native brook trout.

“Fishing is still very good,” Klotz said. “Our goal is to have 1,000 trout per mile.” Klotz said that a couple of good years of reproduction and the river will be back at that mark.

Tuesday morning, the crew sloshed through a river running at 44 cubic feet per second. When the reservoir gates were wide open in January, the flow got as high as 1,870 cfs, according to Matt Baker of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Mountain Maryland Office at Frostburg State University.

Then in March, after the new gates were in operation, a massive rainstorm slammed the area, causing water to flow over the spillway and roar down the river at 4,800 cfs or so. “That storm filled the reservoir in a day, day and a half, and the rest spilled,” Baker said.

“That actually turned out to be a blessing,” said Charles Gougeon, a biologist who traveled from central Maryland to help on the Savage River.

The extreme flow did two things, according to Gougeon. It moved perfectly sized spawning gravel from the reservoir down into the stream and it scoured the silt that had been deposited, pushing it into the North Branch of the Potomac, a larger river in which the sediment would be less of a problem.

“It’s amazing,” Gougeon said, looking around. “If someone came here and wasn’t aware that the reservoir had been drained they would not know anything had taken place. Nature is pretty resilient if you give it a chance, and maybe a little help once in a while.”

Contact Michael A. Sawyers at msawyers@times-news.com.

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