Here are a few picks from our trip to the Cattaraugus River in New York. Me, Karry, and Bill went fishing with Chris Hettinger of Ratboy Custom Tackle and his buddy squirrel. the 5 of us caught somewhere between 150-200 steelhead in 2 days of fishing....it was awesome. im sure Batson will add more to the story.

Wow, that's some killer fishing!

A couple of those holes you were fishing got my blood going, some dandy holes for sure!

Keith

they aren't triploids, they just eat a lot more then our steelhead. they are all hatchery except a few wild and no native. they are lake Erie fish.

Nice catch for sure.

Ain't now way WDFW will let us have a fishery like that!

fp

Great report!

I couldn't imagine making reservations to fish in NY, until now.

Are they still steelhead if you catch that many?

Nice job! I'd be down for a little of that! What was the primary technique for catching them?

either drift or float little spawn sacks. we were running 6lb line and using number 12 hooks.....a lot of people in that area do the center pin thing, but we were using spinning rods.

Must be a lotta' feed in Lake Erie to turn out such fat trout. And to think it wasn't all that many years ago Lake Erie was so polluted it caught on fire. Sometimes things do get better.

Sg

Best pic of the litter.... bonus points for good form on the C&R thing.

Totally agree, Doc. I almost made the same comment. Killer shot and fish!

cool, i heard about this trip from t-bird...look like a bunch of pooh's pond fish

Nice Fish, Awesome shots and some killer water.... Nice report!

dang, those are some thick fish! thanks for sharing.

Looks like fun - bummed I missed this one.

Nice long arms, guys.

Jesus. Nice footballs. Looks like killer fishing over there.

Its truly amazing fishing and the crazy thing is that everyone was complaining on how slow fishing was. There not sure why only 15,000 fish returned to each creek rather than 20,000 LOL.

The one thing they pointed out was that the states respect the fact that the sport fishing community counts as a resource of funding as well as recreation and that they do everything possible to keep folks fishing. They have some extra charges on licensing that allows access to private land owners properties as well as keeps the commercial harvest off the lakes etc. They really do not have much of an issue with Tribal harvest so that helps a bit as well.

You can see a few of the fish caught were wild fish, yes wild as in Hatchery origin natural spawn. Perfect fins with some scar tissue tells me they are wild anywise. Most of there rivers cant sustain natural spawn because there is not enough water to hold smolts in the summer and temperature gets a bit to high for them but some natural spawn does exist.

Final note you can tell there is no real Political lobbying going on from commercial harvest interest groups and was a breath of fresh air for sure. Also without the Native fish issue they can plant tell there hart desires.

Karry Batson
Batson Enterprises Inc
Ph: (877) 875-2381
Fax: (360) 683-3579
karry@batsonenterprises.com
www.batsonenterprises.com