Tuesday, 10 April 2007
By ALAN GREGORY
alangregory@standardspeaker.com
Devin Wiepa doesn’t talk much.
But then, he is only 3 years old.
His dad, Josh, serves as the family spokesman. Father and son showed up at Lily Lake up the road a piece from Wapwallopen Monday afternoon to watch state Fish and Boat Commission crews stock hundreds of hatchery-raised rainbow trout into the lake.
“Say yes, it is,” Josh told his son when a reporter asked if it was Devin’s first time to watch a trout-stocking operation.
Father and son, from Nanticoke, were there with Devin’s grandmother, Lynn Wiepa, his great-grandmother, Elsie Kuloski, and Devin’s fishing friend, Andy Swallo.
The Wiepa clan, and dozens of other would-be anglers, got to Lily Lake a few minutes ahead of the two white tanker trucks from Fish and Boat’s Benner Springs hatchery in Centre County.
“Another truckload of family fishing fun,” a big sign on the rear of each truck proclaimed.
Kadin Thompson, a waterways conservation officer for the state agency, arranged for Devin and a couple of other youngsters to release rainbow trout from buckets into the cold lake water.
Devin, propped up by his father’s knee, had the first honor, tipping over a bucketful of trout as a crowd looked on from atop the boat ramp.
“Look at all the fish, buddy,” Josh told his son as the fish – their flanks showing the colors that give a rainbow trout its name – splashed into the shallows before racing out to deeper water.
“See all the fish?” father asked son.
Devin said little, but a wide grin spread across his face, telling the story just as well as any speech would have.
Out came another bucket and this one included a “palomino,” or “golden” trout – perhaps 3 to 4 pounds of fish.
“Did you see that big yellow carp?” one man said with a laugh as the trout zoomed into the depths.
The stocking at the lake in Slocum Township was one of dozens the agency is accomplishing in the last few days leading up to the opening on Saturday of the trout season in Luzerne and the rest of the state, save for the 17 counties in the southeast region in which the season opened March 31.
But the agency isn’t saying beforehand how many fish it’s putting in selected waterways.
“They’re keeping it hush-hush. That’s why I came over to see,” one veteran angler said while waiting for the tankers to arrive at Lily Lake.
Devin and his dad will be among the hundreds of thousands of anglers expected to fish Pennsylvania waters as trout season gets under way.
Fish and Boat sells nearly 1 million licenses a year, about 10 percent of them going to out-of-staters.
And the agency likes to point out fishing’s economic impact – more than $1.5 billion.
But it’ll be a while yet this year before the agency knows for sure just how many people bought a 2007 license.
“It’s truly too early to read much into license sales,” said Dan Tredinnick, Fish and Boat’s spokesman in Harrisburg.
“At this point – compared to last year – they are up over 15 percent. However, that is not an apples-to-apples comparison for several reasons. One, with the opening of the season two weeks earlier in part of the commonwealth, we’ve undoubtedly shifted sales in those regions up as well.
At Lily Lake, the men, women and kids gathered to watch the stocking operation weren’t the only would-be anglers on hand.
A fish-eating osprey – perhaps newly arrived in Pennsylvania after completing a migration of hundreds if not thousands of miles – soared overhead.
Insect-eating tree swallows, also just arrived from the South, zipped back and forth over the ripples, searching for bugs in the 36-degree weather.
Across the way, a blue jay cried out.
Stocking operations will resume at Lake Irena in Hazle Township’s Community Park on Friday and additional trout will be stocked into Lake Frances at Nescopeck State Park April 17.
The entire trout-stocking schedule can be viewed at Fish and Boat’s Web site, www.fish.state.pa.us
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