maurice99

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TROUT FISHING WITH MAURICE RODWAY - Weekly Column: 14-April-00
Southland, New Zealand

Most Improved Fishery of The Year

The prize for our most improved fishery this year goes to the Waiau. Both the upper Waiau, between the lakes, and the lower Waiau, especially the reach from the Mararoa Weir downstream to the Borland, have provided outstanding fishing right through the season.

The lower Waiau has had a guaranteed minimum flow right through the year since December 1996. This has lead to a large population of mainly small to medium sized trout. In the three seasons since then the number of anglers who have discovered the good fishing here has steadily grown so that now it is rare to find the river without a few anglers trying their luck.

The Fish and Game Council has been monitoring the number of anglers and seeking their opinions about the river fishery, which has a very high catch rate of trout. Many fish are fairly small, in the 20 - 30 cm size class but there are many large trout there too.

Fish and Game have also been monitoring the effectiveness of a fish pass which has been built into the Mararoa Weir by Meridian Energy, the power company which runs the power station on Lake Manapouri. Over 500 trout have been tagged in the last year. Several trout which were tagged and released above the pass have been recaptured in the trap again, showing the fish have gone upstream then down and up again. Anglers have returned tags from trout caught in the Mararoa and Whitestone Rivers.

Recently a small number of trout have been tagged with radio tags which emit a signal that can be detected by a special receiver. This work, also supported by Meridian, is an attempt to discover how fast fish move and how long it takes them to get to various places upstream of the weir. Fish and Game and Meridian are planning a more sophisticated programme which will attempt to find out what proportion of migrating trout use the fish pass and just what proportion of the fish that swim through the fish pass in the weir go to the lakes and to the Mararoa.

Fish and game has had tagging programmes underway for a number of years so we have learnt a great deal about trout behaviour. This new work is an attempt to take the knowledge a step further. The trout with the existing tags should be swimming about in either the Mararoa or the lakes so we hope any that are found can be returned. The tags are like a small piece of spaghetti that stick out by the dorsal (top) fin of the trout. It has a number and contact details of Fish and Game on it.

07-Apr-00   |   31-Mar-00   |   24-Mar-00   |   17-Mar-00

10-Mar-00   |   03-Mar-00   |   25-Feb-00   |   04-Feb-00

07-Jan-00   |   14-Jan-00   |   21-Jan-00   |   27-Jan-00

10-Dec-99   |   03-Dec-99   |   17-Dec-99   |   24-Dec-99

04-Nov-99   |   12-Nov-99   |   19-Nov-99   |   26-Nov-99

01-Oct-99   |   15-Oct-99   |   22-Oct-99   |   29-Oct-99

'98 Columns   |   ´97-´98 Columns

Frontier Fishing Gazette has been published
every week for over one week.

trout@frontierfishing.co.nz

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