All Creatures Fills: Trout Hatchery

The. Fist fight. These fishermen are fishing for these trout rainbow trout and brook trout. These gentlemen are working at the Charles O Hayford hatchery in Hackettstown. Their work increases the fisherman's odd significant weight. They are part of the New Jersey Department of Fish Game and Wildlife which raises trout and stocks the rivers and streams of New Jersey. For many years the hatred hatchery has been a fisherman's dream. The home of countless trout which are loaded onto special trucks and distributed across the

state. It is a very sophisticated operation as Bob William's assistant chief of the Bureau of freshwater fisheries explains. Fishing is provided by the state in New Jersey through the sale of fishing licenses to the general public. The angling public of the state. It's a leisure It's a pastime it's a sport for many people in the spring of the year sort of our bringer of spring time. You say we raise trout mostly in these large earthen ponds that you see here. We have two hundred sixty acres of territory in the West hatchery and 40 acres of territory in the east hatchery consisting mostly ponds and the trout are fed here summer and winter alike. We have nursery buildings with incubators and troughs where the trout are begun to receive their initial feeding and then they are transferred to these concrete raceways that you've seen here and they're progressively

graduated from the nursery building trust the concrete raceways to the large earthen ponds and fed until they achieve a sufficient size in the springtime to be distributed throughout the state. Normally these days we're shipping six or seven truckloads of trout a day throughout the northern part of the state and also the southern part of the state at least aka the large lakes and small streams and also large streams. Believe that we can manage to get. Six trucks out in an hour and a half's time from here because they're preset the day prior to shipping. And if you'll. Notice that. The. In-house vehicles here are weighing fish by water displacement. They have counted samples and that through displacement method they are setting up with a Power Wagon and dumping the fish into compartments of the pools. And it's a highly sophisticated operation as much as the cards are a. Set of the night before hand and the poundage in the destination of the station is all

recorded on parts and therefore it's an easy matter to get the trucks rolling in the morning out of the tree all day long. They're setting up for the next day. Who is it that decides when they should go in what quantity and with what frequency. All of that is a predetermined by a baseline which is approved by the Fish and Game Council and Mr. Muir Aski who is the assistant chief in charge of the stocking program determines sets up the list. The council approves of it and. Every body of water which is stocked must be accessible to public fishing. Because we survive on the sale of fishing licenses to the general public. Assistant Chief walk me around ski. Well it's it goes back many years and we it's a complicated development of the present. Shot allocation but it's what we call

baseline is something that we've had all laid out and it's never going to be perfect and it never will be perfect but we're constantly upgrading it and constantly changing it to reflect changes in open water changes in population and angular density things along that line. And we've been we're constantly making biological surveys to determine exactly what species we should be stocking. But this brought Brown a rainbow that sort of thing. So all these factors and many more go into what we call the trout stocking baseliner allocation list. How does Mr. Muir ASCII handle complaints from fishermen who don't feel that their waters have been stocked sufficiently. Well that's always a problem of course but slowly over the years the anglers have learned that they can't catch fish every day of the season and that there are certain days when the weather's cold or the weather is just plain stormy and or or what have you the water is muddy and the catch isn't as good as that like it to be. But we receive all sorts of complaints and we we try

to examine the nature of the problem and see whether or not it's if it's anything we can correct it to make a situation better to to improve the catch to make sure the fish are good where they should be in the stream and and so so forth. We can assure you that the fish are distributed. We followed one of the trucks into the can Lockwood Gorge in hundred in county. As you can see we weren't alone. It's not uncommon for cars to follow the fish trucks. Conservation Officer Steve Schuster explains these gentlemen usually don't fish unless the sea is put in the exact spot. But the problem with that is assumes a fish in the water swimming upstream downstream. They spread themselves out fairly well. Have these fishermen figured that out over the years. Some of them have. But some of them just won't fish into which they see as professional. As you saw earlier was about 20 cars following us. And they do it every every week just to see exactly where we put the fish.

And they just won't believe me if I tell them I put them in the middle seat. We'd like to remind you that any resident or nonresident who intends to fish in the fresh waters of New Jersey must first procure a fishing license. Licenses may be obtained from any county or municipal clerk designated agent or registrar of licenses.