MWV Creates Voluntary Catch and Release Area

Meade/Westvaco is hoping a new designation will help spur the population of native brook trout in a West Virginia watershed.  The company recently announced a plan alongside the DNR creating a voluntary catch and release of native brookies on Laurel Creek.

"We can’t make it mandatory catch and release,"  said forester Aaron Plaugher, "That takes an act of the legislature, but we’re hoping people will throw back the native brook trout in the area above Jettsville in the four tributaries of Laurel Creek."

The company has made the watershed a project where they hope to create an enhanced native trout fishery.

"They (DNR) have done some pre-sampling, before we started any of our changes and all of the streams they sampled had native brook trout in them," said Plaugher. "Like all of our mountain streams, the numbers varied.  Some of them would be very small with few trout mixed in with other species and then some of them had quite a few."

The native brookies in West Virginia are already a fragile species.  The fish are already beset by difficult conditions.  Plaugher and his crews are trying to reverse the trend and make the habitat and water quality more conducive to enhance the fishery. 

"We’ve got three installations of lime in the headwater streams because the pH in some of them was a problem, so we’ve added the lime." said Plaugher.  "Then we’ve added large woody debris to create some pools and most recently we’ve asked the public to go to a voluntary catch and release."

The woody debris work has been underway since 2008, but Plaugher says they’re learning better ways to handle it as they go.   Many of the logs laid in the water last summer were moved by the vast melting snow this past spring.

"You really rely on getting some high water to create the dam to move some material in behind the wood and force it to flow over the wood and create scour pools," explained Plaugher. "But what we found is several of those moved because of the high water.  They shifted ten-feet down stream and they’re up against the bank."

Plaugher says as they build more of the woody dams, they’re anchoring the ends with cables in hopes of achieving better stabilization.

The 27-thousand acre watershed covers tributaries that flow from Greenbrier, Nicholas, and Fayette Counties from Cold Knob to the Cherry River near Richwood.   So far, MWV’s work has concentrated on four of the streams in the watershed, but Plaugher says it’s a long term project with the goal of working on various streams throughout the region to establish a better native brook fishery.