Batten Kill Browns and Brookies

Thirty-five years ago, before I fished the Batten Kill for the first time, I asked a friend his impressions of the river. “It runs cold all summer,” he said, “and fish sip little stuff all day long. Lots of brook trout and small browns.” A few years later I moved to southern Vermont, and in some seasons spent five or six nights a week (and sometimes all day) on the river. I’ve seen a lot change over the years.

The Batten Kill was one of the last sizable Eastern rivers outside of Maine to hold healthy populations of wild brook trout. That hasn’t changed much over 30 years. What has declined is the brown trout population, which runs contrary to what you might expect, as brown trout are normally more tolerant of increased water temperatures, moderate pollution, and angling pressure.

In the early 1970s, you could count on catching 15 or 20 wild trout during a good Hendrickson hatch. Most of them would be 8- to 11-inch brown trout, with a few brookies mixed in. If you were lucky, you might tie into a 15-inch monster brown. The river was under Vermont general regulations—12 fish of any size—and was heavily fished. But despite the harvesting, the trout population seemed to hold up just fine.

Early Inklings of a Problem

The river was full of trout of all sizes when I started fishing it, and it continued to fish well until the early 1990s. By 1995, small brown trout had vanished, and as a result most people caught fewer fish. At first I thought it was me—you go out on the river a few times and you don’t see or hook any fish, you just shrug your shoulders. Brown trout are moody and sometimes they just don’t feed.

One bright day in May, with perfect water levels, 55-degree F. water temperatures, and a heavy Hendrickson hatch, I learned something was seriously wrong. For two hours I stared holes in the river without seeing a single rise. This was on the lower stretch, downstream of where it meets the town of Arlington, makes a right-hand turn to the west, and changes from a slow, deep, brushy stream to a more open, riffle-and-pool river.

So I decided to try the upstream areas, long the home of large brown trout suckered from their deep holes by night crawlers in the middle of the night. The water here is slow and deep and the banks are tangled, so it doesn’t get much fly-fishing pressure.

What I found there was both exciting and dreadful. I had to spend hours looking for a rising fish, but when I found one, it was very large for this river. Over the next few years, I took several brown trout over 20 inches and one amazing fish of about 23 inches. But I never saw a brown trout less than 15 inches long. I think those big fish were always present, but when you step into a pool of a dozen rising fish you get careless, and I suspect that the bigger trout were slinking into cover while we caught the smaller fish that weren’t as spooky.

By 1994, through careful and deliberate study of

electroshocking data, Ken Cox, Vermont district biologist in charge of the Batten Kill, determined that the number of brown trout greater than 6 inches long had declined 64 percent since 1988. This was doubly unfortunate because for five years there were slot-limit regulations on a 2-mile stretch of river. The slot-limit area showed a 45-percent decline in total trout abundance that was not statistically different from the areas of river left under general regulations.

What happened to the brown trout? Have they come back? Is it still worth fishing?

Current Issues

Although not as rich in tradition as Catskills and Pennsylvania rivers, the Batten Kill is an important part of our angling legacy. It’s where Charles Orvis developed his famous wooden rods and ventilated fly reel. The river inspired his daughter, Mary Orvis Marbury, to compile the first standardized recipes of fly patterns in the United States in 1892.

Lee Wulff, John Atherton, and Hoagy Carmichael all lived on the river. Ernie Schwiebert, Vince Marinaro, Nick Lyons, Al Caucci, and Bob Nastasi all fished the Batten Kill. When Wulff and Atherton moved to the Batten Kill area in the late 1940s, the river had a reputation for large brown trout. It was heavily stocked, and it had been lightly fished for five years while most young men were away at war and gas was rationed. And the river was enriched with domestic sewage.

It’s scientifically proven that nutrient-rich sewage improves trout-stream productivity as long as water temperatures stay below 70 degrees, and the river’s dissolved oxygen supply doesn’t get depleted. In 1979, the old primary sewage treatment plant on the upper Batten Kill was replaced with a state-of-the-art tertiary plant, which deprived the river of nutrients that had been a staple for 100 years. The blanket caddis hatches declined (most caddis species are filter feeders and thrive in water with a high nutrient content) but the number of mayflies seemed to increase. Brown trout numbers waned.

It’s nearly impossible to point to a single smoking gun in any ecosystem, and a lot of other things were changing in the watershed. A number of June hurricanes hit southern Vermont in the 1970s, and after the worst one, Agnes, a flurry of channelization hit most of the tributaries.

One of the most destructive floods was on the lower reaches of Roaring Branch, the Batten Kill’s largest tributary. A campground owner bulldozed Roaring Branch for a quarter mile upstream of its confluence with the Batten Kill. Besides the gravel and silt sent downstream in the load of debris, the new channel, with its increased velocity, slammed into an unstable gravel deposit on the Batten Kill’s far bank.