Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire stocking fish from a plane....

This happened to me at a high mountain lake in Colorado maybe 40 years ago. It was a Cessna Skymaster equipped with bomb-bay doors. Was peppered with fingerling trout.

I wonder what the kill rate is.

I was walking through the woods in the uintas and saw a bunch of fish in the ground. Figured the guy missed the lake.

Having dropped a few things from airplanes in my time, it is probably surprisingly difficult to hit smaller lakes with fingerling trout. Unless you have a spotter, it is hard to see straight down and gauge the moment of release. Then there is the wind, which has to affect those lightweight little critters a lot.

The worst impact on the fish would be the first moments of the drop, where their airspeed is highest. As soon as drag slows them down, they would fall at a much lower speed. Hitting the water would be a lower impact than that first second or two of the drop.

Heck, I've seen fish die just from being chucked back into a pond. Can't imagine this is much more gentle.

It also surprises me how often they are stocking. Wouldn't think those remote lakes would experience that much fishing pressure.

Whirling disease.

Right out of the Russian Tactical book, this is how they dropped soldiers into the snow during WWII. Survival crate isn’t as important and getting them there...

Former employee of mine just got hired on by Utah, and this is part of what he does.

Virtually no mortality. Fingerlings aren't that heavy, so they never gain that much speed. Those lakes are often pretty marginal for winter survival because they are iced over so long. 7, 8 months of ice cover and no food is no an ideal environment for fish. Second, though human pressure is usually rather low, there's lots of other predation in high lakes. One eagle or osprey will take the population down to near zero if they nest nearby.

Whirling disease is really a non issue for alpine lakes. Very few are infected, and if they are, whirling disease on the west slope is much less problematic on the west slopes than on the east slopes of the Rockies. We think it has something to do with the species of tubifex worms that act as intermediate host to the parasite not being as susceptible.

I was canoeing on a Canadian lake years ago when a plane flew over and dropped little trout. Several landed inside our canoe, and many on the water around us. We did not see a single dead one on the surface after the drop. I did see several that hit the water, lay on their side for a very few seconds as if stunned, and then vigorously swam down into the lake.

They do that here to stock the remote Adirondack lakes.

Why bother stocking sterile lakes?

So.....very few people fish for them and those that don't die off in the winter are eaten by predators yet we keep restocking them.

Your tax dollars at work.

I've wondered the same thing. The fish hit the water at perhaps 50 MPH (forward speed combined with falling speed); they've got to be at least stunned.

This was my first thought.

I've stocked sockeyes by plane in AK. When dropped from a lower height there is mortality due to the high rate of speed when they hit the water, and they don't orient themselves headfirst into the water. From higher up (100' or so) there is virtually no mortality at all.



This is the viewing window the pilot has so he can see how the fish are doing.



Here's a shot of the fry going into the plane. You can see the air lines that run from a tank under the pilots seat to air stones mounted inside the tank in the plane. If the pilot sees the fish starting to get sluggish he can give them a shot of O2.

Learn sumtin new every day!

What Hank said. The terminal velocity of a fingerling (after it decelerates from plane speed) is very low - on the order of a few feet per second. Probably no more than if they were dropped from 15 feet or so. Slower than the water they dropped with, in fact, because they have a higher drag factor than a sphere of water.

The fly fishing snobs you see carefully cradling their precious trout during release . . . who gently move them back and forth to move water across their gills before they swim off . . . who gasp in horror at anyone "tossing" a trout back into the water . . . now those guys would have a heart attack if they saw this.

Here is a video of a guy who runs a business called Fireboxstove.com. He is from Utah and has many Youtube videos of his trips up to these remote lakes where he catches his dinner and cooks them up on his camping gear.

Great thread.