Home Forums Fishing Flyfishing Aerial trout stocking in California

Surprised they're using a King Air but you could cover a lot of ground.

Thanks for sharing. Read one time how some of these high lakes have better big fish potential than others. This due to location and how mountain updrafts deposit food, mostly ants, Grasshoppers, and Beatles.

I've been involved with aerial transports of fish in a few different kinds of planes, never one of those though.

Those DFG bastidges got me all hyped up, only to let me down. Not a single lake in my county mentioned in the video is not vehicle accessible. And there I was thinking that maybe I’d missed out on some opportunities.

Another absolutely pathetic photo op attempt by a totally dysfunctional agency to bolster license sales which have dropped alarmingly in the last 20 years. Funds that are robbed from sportsmen fees to finance "studies" of non game species to delight the Sierra Club set. There are about 167 lakes capable of sustaining fish populations in the three wilderness areas around me, but they stopped stocking over 20 years ago. They used to stock the lakes with joint cooperation using Forest Service fire helicopters. In 1980 there were roughly 20 packing and guide services here serving this area, now there are 3...struggling to survive because elk and deer hunting is much worse than the fishing. Is there anything that any govt agency can do well?

I don’t know how slow that airplane can get and still fly without danger of hitting a mountain, but those fish look like they were released at Mach 1 and darned high.

My guess is the mortality rate is much higher than they claim in the video…

My guess is your guess is entirely accurate. Down on the Hoopa Rez, an empty beer bottle dropped from the Martins Ferry bridge, height 135 ft, shatters the bottle every time.

The Gulkana Hatchery up in interior Alaska stocks Crosswinds Lake with millions of sockeye fry every year. The pilot drops them from about 100' up at about 150mph out of a modified crop duster. When I was involved he was using the yellow plane, apparently his new one has about 250 more hp and can go faster..... The survival rates of the fry are well over 90% believe it or not. They tried dropped them closer to the water and most of them died. Dropping them from further up gives them a chance to get oriented correctly. Trust me it works.

Aerial stocking fish

Watch that video again and how small the lake is, how high the plane is and how fast it is going. At 100-150 mph, those fish had better be able to walk, because I doubt they just dropped straight down to the lake at that speed…

A buddy used to bush pilot in Alaska. His first month of work in the early spring was mostly aerial fish stocking.

They do a lot of that in the mountains here in Utah.

Pretty cool they do that in the cascades too. Pretty cool

Flying fish??