Since winter seems to have ended and I am in Atlanta for my spring break enjoying some warm weather, this entry is going to be another essay.

I have always wanted to live next to a trout stream, preferably on an isolated stretch which I could fish in solitude. When I took my job at Radford University in 1986, I had hoped I would be able to eventually attain that dream. Of course, that kind of property is very expensive and as a teacher starting out at $22,000, I never came close to having the financial wherewithal to reach my goal. Instead, after years of searching, I settled on a large tract of relatively inexpensive land that had a very small stream running through it. I thought that I might eventually get a backhoe in to dig out a couple of pools and stock them, but with a large mortgage I never pursued that plan.
My next idea was to build a pond just below the small cabin I lived in, and I even had a Virginia extension agent come out and site a pond and give me some information about building it. It would have required the expense of many dump truck loads of clay and many hours of bulldozer or backhoe work, and in those days I had a massive amount of credit card debt (mainly from building the cabin).
Years later, after having an off-the-grid log house built with my partner Tracy, I decided it was time to finally build a trout pond. My salary was much higher and my debt load was very manageable. The house, however, was fifty yards below where the earlier pond would have been, so I had no choice but to build below our home. That meant the pond would be much smaller, more like a pondette.
I hired Ronnie, the backhoe operator who had worked on the house, and in a couple of days, I had a 20 by 30 foot, earthen dammed pond, drained by two six inch green PVC pipes. It leaked a bit by the pipes but looked relatively stable and was—until the first heavy rains from the remnants of a hurricane washed out the fill between the two pipes and then tore away a quarter of the dam.
Ronnie returned and we rebuilt it even larger, this time with only one pipe, figuring that would be sturdier than with the two pipes, but heavy rains washed this one out also. I had spent a couple of thousand dollars and I had little more than a puddle.
Ronnie visited again and we decided that we would use a more clay like fill (which he brought in in his dump truck) instead of the stuff he was borrowing from the hollow, and after he was done, I would have a concrete spillway poured.
I had worked in marine construction for several years, so I knew how to construct forms and position rebar. After Ronnie finished, I framed out a long spillway that angled up at the ends. Fifteen pieces of three foot rebar had been hammered into the clay with four inches of each one sticking up to within an inch of the top of the frame. I ordered 7 tons of concrete and when it arrived I had it chuted in and I had to shovel some of it around and then float it with a former student I hired for the afternoon.
This version of my dam seemed to be holding well, but my worries about the next heavy rain led me to dig out a trench with the bucket of my farm tractor and bury a 22 inch plastic culvert on one side of the dam. Now I thought I had enough drainage, and since then the culvert has never filled up more than half. The problem is that we have not had any rainfall equal to the two hurricane related storms, so I still had some concern about what would happen if the water ever got up to the spillway.
To stock the pond, I had expected to go to the hatchery in Newport, where I had years earlier bought 25 small trout and brought them back in two plastic garbage containers to stock a private section of the North Fork of the Roanoke River near my land. However, the Newport hatchery had gone out of business. I finally figured out on the internet that the nearest public hatchery in Wytheville. The friendly owner told me that he would sell me as many 9 inch rainbows as I wanted for a dollar apiece and he would lend me a tank to transport them.
I emptied the inside of the camper top on my pickup and drove the hour and a half to the hatchery. When I got there, there was a little bait and switch, as the owner told me that he could only sell me some 12 inch trout at 2 dollars each. That didn’t bother me too much but when I saw the large tank that needed to be loaded into my 4 cylinder, half ton truck, I began to worry. The tank held about two hundred gallons of water and at about 8 pounds per gallon I would be able to do a wheelie if I wanted. Another problem involved running the aerator motor’s clips to my battery, but I quickly figured that out.
The owner and his helper then netted me fifty decent rainbows, and with a fifty pound bag of trout food, I started, very slowly, on my way. I had come down on I-81 but I was scared to drive back on it. I could feel my front wheels weren’t solidly on the ground, particularly noticeable when I tried to turn. But I also wanted to get the trout home quickly so when I reached 81 I got on and kept the speedometer at 45.
After thirty minutes I couldn’t hear the aerator going so I pulled over and found that the old wires on it, which had at least a hundred yards of electrical tape on them, had shorted out. The trout were stressed, gulping at the surface, and I rushed to retape several of the bare spots on the wires. That fixed, I was back on the highway and in another thirty minutes I was exiting 81 at Radford, figuring I’d go the rest of the way on the local roads. I made a big sweeping turn to exit and halfway through I heard a loud crash. I immediately pulled over and I could see that the tank had shifted and taken out the camper’s long side window. I figured that was a three hundred dollar turn, and I still had to get the trout home. Forty five minutes later I was next to the North Fork, desperately netting and dropping 25 of the trout into the river. That finished, I drove to my pond and unloaded the rest, all of them having survived the journey. But I had no time to relax as I had to drive back to Whytheville to return the tank.
I fished the river several times after that, but never caught any of the stocked trout. I had thought to catch a few of the 25 in the pond to restock every few months, but as my partner and I got used to watching the lovely rainbows, they became pets. They have done well, some measuring over 18 inches, but recently I started to worry about them.
My pond, originally five feet deep, had now silted up to where it was barely two feet deep. At first the trout could hide in the depths but presently they were always visible, possibly subject to predators. To alleviate the problem, I called Ronnie again to dig out the sediment, but first I had to figure out how to get the trout out of the pond, since the professor I spoke to at Virginia Tech thought that leaving them in would probably suffocate them all.
I first ordered a long handled net and added eight more feet of handle to it. It was incredibly unwieldy and I would have had more luck capturing an alien spacecraft than any of those fleeting trout.
My next attempt involved trying to catch the trout with my fly rod. I have caught tens of thousands of trout over my career, and I have written for magazines like Sports Afield and Fly Fisherman. I certainly thought I was up to the challenge, but after I hooked one on a hare’s ear nymph, the other trout shut down completely. I threw Royall Wulffs at them, wooly buggers, and more nymphs but nothing happened. At that rate it would take weeks to catch them all.
Next I thought to use a large minnow seine, which I purchased online, and thought my problem solved. Yes, I would have to have three people to work the seine, all of them wading through at least three feet of mud, but I was sure we could corral the trout and dump them into a small inflatable pool.
As the date approached for the project, however, I had more doubts and pondered a third solution. If I rented a pump, I could drain the pond and then Tracy could easily net the confined trout. (You may wonder why I would have my partner netting trout in the heavy mud, but I had recently had a colon resection and was in the midst of chemotherapy. One of the drugs, Oxaliapatin, caused extreme pain in my hands and feet if they touched anything cold.) I did find a pump to rent but its cost was over a hundred dollars so I decided to see what it would take to purchase one. The salesman at the store suggested using a sump pump since that would be much less expensive, and would empty the pond in under four hours.
Now I had to have Ronnie out to dig a bypass ditch (where I wanted another long culvert installed just above the one feeding the pond). That dug, when we were ready to start all I would have to do was dump a few shovelfuls of dirt in front of the pond culvert, and the water would be diverted through the bypass ditch.
Our next stop was Lowe’s where I purchased a sump pump for about one hundred dollars and then I had to build a stand that would sit in the mud and allow the pump to stay at least a few inches above. My design was to make a kind of box-like frame, four long legs with a plywood shelf for the pump about two feet from the bottom, then another shelf three foot above to stabilize the whole thing.
Tracy and I had set up and filled two small inflatable pools the day before, and with everything ready, I shoveled in some dirt in front of the culvert to stop the flow. Tracy got in the water, and had to wade through thick, thick mud to get to the middle and set the stand, to which I had firmly attached the pump. When I plugged it in it worked perfectly.
After three hours of pumping, we had perhaps five hundred gallons of water left and the pump was sucking in air so we stopped it. Tracy tried to start netting the trout but in the thick chocolatey water she couldn’t find them.
The only thing to do was to keep moving the stand around and pushing it closer to the uneven bottom. It was hard work for Tracy, but in another hour we had all the trout in a small area, shallow area.
Tracy began netting the trout and handing the net up to me on the bank, then I would deposit them in one of the wading pools, aerated by garden hoses attached to our spring-sourced water system. In forty-five minutes that was finished and now it was time for Ronnie to return early the next day.
Ronnie spent several hours digging out the muddy bottom and depositing it on the other side of the dam. I was quite impressed with all the mud and then wet fill he got out, and when he had finished, we went to work on the long bypass culvert (about 50 feet long). That required joining three section of plasic pipe and then filling the ditch back in, but by early afternoon, the bypass was complete, and I had reopened the culvert to the pond. The water began to settle and clear quickly and I had all the trout back in the pond by twilight.
Overall, my trout program cost over $7,000 and at least one hundred hours of my time. I did catch one trout in the pond, and I have no doubt I could catch another within a year or two.