Sylvaneous
Well-known member
- Joined
- Sep 11, 2006
- Messages
- 1,137
Over the past 2 (if I recall correctly), Spring has had some dramatic stream...enhancement isn't sufficient...re-making. What was flat-ish, fine gravel without much habitat and therefor not many fish and bad bank situations has been really, utterly reconstructed, remade. I have been a critic of stream work because so much of it DOES NOT WORK, and seems to be potempkin stream work that leaves the stream WORSE off in a few years (Little Sandy, as bad as it was, is now worse than it was before the stream work and some work pieces are not even where most of the water flows anymore?
There is some metaphor for something done half as well as it should be and making things worse. If there isn't , there shold be.
But this work on Spring was in the vein of the McCoy Dam restoration; from no habitat to lots, within the exigent parameters that piece of geography provided (This water here is really fast!) It was heavy work, deep work, large work and work that wasn't precise, intricate or detailed, except for the lunker logging along the bank. It was big rocks and large cobble, lots of it, placed with an excavator, structured to make habitat like you would seek on the other, rockier streams in PA. What is the good water on Penns? What is the good water on Big Fishing Creek? OK. Make it look or reflect that: those features. It works. I landed one of the nicest browns I've caught on Spring in quite a while where a riffle dam plunge thing went along a lunker log bank. It works. But it needs to be BIG and it needs to be able to work over time as the stream and the structures in it change. No 3" rock is going to be much trout habitat. So don't EVER put 3" rocks in trout streams unless it's part of gravel that fills in the gaps between 18" rocks.
There is some metaphor for something done half as well as it should be and making things worse. If there isn't , there shold be.
But this work on Spring was in the vein of the McCoy Dam restoration; from no habitat to lots, within the exigent parameters that piece of geography provided (This water here is really fast!) It was heavy work, deep work, large work and work that wasn't precise, intricate or detailed, except for the lunker logging along the bank. It was big rocks and large cobble, lots of it, placed with an excavator, structured to make habitat like you would seek on the other, rockier streams in PA. What is the good water on Penns? What is the good water on Big Fishing Creek? OK. Make it look or reflect that: those features. It works. I landed one of the nicest browns I've caught on Spring in quite a while where a riffle dam plunge thing went along a lunker log bank. It works. But it needs to be BIG and it needs to be able to work over time as the stream and the structures in it change. No 3" rock is going to be much trout habitat. So don't EVER put 3" rocks in trout streams unless it's part of gravel that fills in the gaps between 18" rocks.
