(Dave Whitlock art)
September 18, 2024
By Dave Whitlock
This article originally appeared in the March 2007 issue of Fly Fisherman.
It’s widely thought that trout and fly fishing combine to create the highest plateau of fishing. However, in Muskogee, Oklahoma, at the time I was born and grew up, both trout and fly fishing were nonexistent. You can imagine my fascination when I discovered them both in my grandpa’s L. L. Bean catalog and Outdoor Life and Field & Stream magazines.
When I was seven years old, I accidentally caught my first trout on a white doughball with a cane pole while fishing for chubs and sunfish in a tiny stream near Gatlinburg, Tennessee. My first fly rod, an old warped and peeling bamboo, was a birthday gift from my dad and came from a pawnshop in Dubuque, Iowa, when I was nine. Both experiences were landmarks in my life, and I remember them as vividly as if they had happened last year, rather than six decades ago!
I didn’t have the opportunity to put trout and my fly rod together until I was fifteen and my parents drove me from Muskogee to Roaring River State Park near Cassville, Missouri. I remember it as an exotic experience, catching those beautiful, spotted and red-striped rainbows. In fact, my wonderful Oklahoma panfish and bass fly fishing suddenly paled by comparison. After that trip, all I could dream of was more trout. I wanted to have a trout stream close to home so I could ride my bike there and fish every weekend and all summer long. You could say I was hooked.
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Several years later, in the mid-1950s, when the Army Corps of Engineers constructed Tenkiller Dam across northeastern Oklahoma’s Illinois River, I got my trout wish—in a way. The federal government stocked rainbows in the tailwater below the dam. Trout did and still do survive there, but not very naturally.
I still dreamed of having a real trout stream, where trout spawned and lived their entire life. As I started college and became more mobile—with a ’37 Dodge coupe—I began searching the state for a cold stream that I might somehow stock with trout. Within four or five years I found three small, spring-fed streams in the Ozark Mountains with the right year-round water conditions to support trout. Each had great water quality, correct water temperatures, lots of stream plants, diverse aquatic insects, and was located in a relatively remote area of northeast Oklahoma.
In 1968, Bob Cunningham, Micky and Don Hall, and I organized a club called the Green Country Fly Fishers. The club drew members from both Tulsa and Bartlesville, Oklahoma. One of our first priorities was to get this dream of ours off the ground and create a viable wild-trout stream. After getting permission from the Oklahoma Game and Fish Department to stock trout in Spring Creek (the best stream close to Tulsa and Bartlesville), we looked into the cost of buying and transporting mature brown trout from either Colorado or Pennsylvania but were disappointed to find we did not have the funds needed.
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About that time, two fortunate things happened. First, a Montana fishery biologist explained to me that the best way to establish trout in a new or marginal fishery was to introduce them as eggs or fry. Then the next week, club member Milt Blaustine read a short piece by Don Warn in Trout magazine about a trout-egg hatching box designed in France—the Vibert Box. Warn’s Trout Unlimited chapter purchased some of these inexpensive boxes and used them to stock a stream in the Catskills.
The Vibert Box was designed by Dr. Richard Vibert, a French fishery biologist, to protect and incubate about 500 eyed trout eggs per box in the gravel of a trout stream. The eggs are placed in the box and the box is buried in gravel in optimum areas of the stream. When the round eggs hatch, the slender egg-sac fry pass through the narrow slots of the box and out into the stream gravel—more or less duplicating the birth of a wild trout. (See the spring 2002 issue of Trout , “Birth of a Wild Trout.”) Due to predation and siltation, only 10 percent of trout eggs deposited in a stream by a pair of wild fish might hatch.
The Vibert Box sometimes results in hatching 75 to 85 percent of eyed eggs.
Dr. Vibert designed the box as a portable, economical, and reusable egg incubator. His hope was to partly reduce the need for expensive hatcheries while producing an environment for trout to survive and eventually spawn in the wild. Green Country Fly Fishers decided to begin a three-year Vibert Box program using 50,000 eyed, brown-trout eggs per year to hopefully make Spring Creek a wild, brown trout stream. Browns seemed to be the best choice to adapt and spawn in our warmer environment.
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In 1971, for $250 worth of eggs, about $100 for 100 Vibert Boxes, and a few days of labor by Green Country Fly Fishers, my Oklahoma trout stream dream took the first steps forward. We selected a one-mile section with the best habitat, and then got landowner Dr. George Camps’s permission to plant the boxes on his section of the creek.
The precious brown-trout eggs from George Stack’s Paradise Brook Trout Co. in Cresco, Pennsylvania, arrived by air express on December 10 in a big Styrofoam box. They were in foam trays, wrapped in cotton diapers and cooled by crushed ice. We carefully sorted the dead eggs from the thousands of healthy, bright pinkish-orange, pearl-sized eggs. The tiny eyes seemed to be eagerly looking at us through the transparent shells.
Some of the club members joined me in my kitchen and gently placed 500 eggs in each of the 100 Vibert Boxes. We kept them wet and cold with ice while we drove 50 miles to the water.
At streamside, each member had an important job. Some carefully and slowly tempered the eggs with stream water to get the eggs up to the stream temperature. Others dug holes in the streambed, while the rest cleaned and sized nest gravel with screen wire sifters. Then we placed the boxes in the depressions, anchored them, and gently poured 3 to 6 inches of clean, pea-to-walnut-size gravel over each to conceal them from predators and protect them from ultraviolet radiation and siltation. The whole process took 21 people all day to complete. It was hard, wet, and cold work, but I think every one of us knew something special was accomplished that winter day.
Every weekend we visited the site, and with glass-bottom buckets carefully observed our trout garden. The eggs hatched in 10 to 14 days, and after two months most of the fry had moved out of the nest area. After eight weeks, we removed all 100 boxes and counted the dead eggs. We had an incredible 85- to 90- percent hatch rate!
In late March 1972, Bob and I began an underwater search for our baby browns. Much to our surprise and concern, we saw no trout fry in March, April, May, or June of that year.
Then, when we were almost at the point of admitting failure, it happened. I was quietly snorkeling in a small, shady pool when I saw the most beautiful sight of my life up to that time. There, six feet away from me busily feeding in the clear, sun-dappled water was a par-marked, black- and red-spotted, five-inch trout.
Today I still get tears in my eyes and goose bumps when I think of that moment. I came up and yelled my delight to Bob, who at first thought I’d been snake bit. We were ecstatic—jumping and hollering for joy! After we calmed down, another look revealed two more little wild browns sharing the run with the first one. Over a period of two more weeks we located about 30 or 40 small browns and, in time, more appeared. We watched them grow and become more beautiful each week.
Inspired, the club planted 50,000 more eggs each fall. By the fourth year, we saw pairs of mature browns spawning right where they had emerged from their Vibert Boxes. At year six, a local fisherman caught a 12-pound brown in Spring Creek. Our dream had come true, and the process had taught us much about the miracle and treasure of wild trout. Even if we had not been successful, the project brought us all closer and gave so much understanding of what it takes for a wild trout to survive all the challenges and dangers of stream life, from birth to maturity.
After a few years of varied success with Vibert Boxes across North America—and with Dr. Vibert’s permission—I redesigned the box to be a more versatile and efficient incubator, with a second, lower nursery section. This section provides further protection for the newly born, helpless sac-fry by not allowing them to escape the box until they are more developed and capable of survival. Bob worked with the Federation of Fly Fishers (now Fly Fishers International, FFI) to have Phillips Petroleum Co. manufacture these new Whitlock-Vibert Boxes, and Phillips sold them to us at their cost.
Today, Whitlock-Vibert Boxes are used all over North America, Europe, and Asia to help create, preserve, and improve trout, char, and salmon fisheries. I donated the box design and all proceeds to the FFI. It provides information, training, and Whitlock-Vibert Boxes to interested parties. It is mandatory to have the permission of the state wildlife agency in your area before you use the boxes. For more information, contact the FFI at flyfishersinternational.org .
Oh, by the way, the one-time all-tackle world- record brown trout, a 40-pound 4-ounce monster caught by Rip Collins in 1992 on the Little Red River in Arkansas , was one of the 50,000 brown trout eggs stocked by the Arkansas Fly Fishers club using Whitlock-Vibert Boxes. Our dreams come true by the degree of resolve we have to make them come true.
Dave Whitlock was a Fly Fisherman editor-at-large and an author, artist, photographer, fly designer, and lecturer.
