Testing the waters

The instructions were explicit: Don't waste time with the big ones.

Simple enough. In plain talk it meant that as a crew member on the night-time fish study of the Green River below Flaming Gorge Reservoir, duties required netting fish, not trophies.

Standing on the bow of the aluminum boat, holding onto the safety rail and looking down at several dozen fish as they surfaced, the smallest about the size of a man's hand and the largest big enough to make a snack of the smaller fish, the temptation was too great.

Down went the dipnet toward the head of a fish much longer than the net was wide, up came an empty net.

Ignoring other fish, down went the dipnet again, then up it came — empty. Down it went again, for a third try, and the result was the same. By now, the boat had passed the backwater cove and what should have been a cache of fish.

Then it became ever so clear: There was good reason to ignore the trophies. Fish too big for the nets are impressive but impossible to study if you can't catch 'em. Still, I tried.

Biologists back on the launch ramp, where a makeshift laboratory had been set up, needed fish for their study, and on that one pass I contributed not a single fish.

Over the next 10 minutes, however, I scooped up, sometimes two and three at a time, between 50 and 60 fish — browns and rainbows, mostly, with an occasional whitefish in the pool. I lost count of the total in the hurry to swing the long-handled net between the surface of the water and the large livewell in the center of the boat.

Once a year, volunteers and staff from the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources conduct a two-night electro-fishing study on the Green River below Flaming Gorge Dam.

The first night, crews worked along a one-mile stretch below the dam. The second night they moved to Little Hole and netted fish downstream for about a mile and a quarter.

These same two sections have been sampled since 1986, "Which means that from our studies we can pretty much tell what's happening on the river," said Roger Schneidervin, project leader at the Gorge for the DWR.

The seven-mile stretch of Green River below the dam is one of the most heavily fished sections of river in Utah and is recognized as one of the best trout-fishing waters in the country.