I'm Shocked, I Tell You ...

Florida Electric Chair

At left, a public domain picture of the Florida electric chair constructed as a replacement for the '23 model as deployed in 1998. It's oak.

Saturday saw a fish shocking survey of Mill Creek, the small trout stream here in Dexter, MI  that Trout Unlimited ( the AATU chapter) is rehabilitating with help from the Michigan DNR.

The hot summer took its toll. Stretches that previously saw upwards of eighty fish saw five collected yesterday. The hot summer did us no favors.

It's a process and we all know that. It's still tough thinking we've lost a couple of years worth of fish population -- at least.

Surveys from far upstream did show good fish hold-over numbers and here in the past month we've seen the biggest trout for the year landed in the Sloan Preserve area upstream of where we conducted shocking.

Still, we've a lot of heat-murdered trout anyway we look at it.

We can hope this year was an exceptional year. '79, '80 and '81 were unbelievably hot on the plains were I was at the time. The winters were a bitch, too. On the average it worked out.

If we're going to average out this year here in Michigan, I'm going to need to lay in more firewood.

Prost.