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LeTort trout disappearing?
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LeTort Spring Run at Shady Lane shows marshy growth. (Wally Shank/The Sentinel)
"Standing for long moments, surveying the ... water where the quarry is, avoiding sudden movements, approaching slowly and carefully, and using all available cover ... is the only successful way to approach the wild and fearful trout of the LeTort."
— "A Modern Dry Fly Code," Introduction to the Second Edition
Fishing guide Herb Weigl will not take clients to LeTort Spring Run anymore.
Not that the stream isn't as gorgeous as ever. He just doesn't think they will get their money's worth.
"The stream today is a pale shadow of what it was in the old days," says Weigl, co-owner with wife Kathy of Cold Spring Anglers in Carlisle. "There's not as many fish in the stream."
The LeTort's fame is traced to legendary fly-fishermen/authors such as Charlie Fox, Vince Marinaro and Ernie Schwiebert, who developed many of the flies and fly fishing techniques widely used today. They had to get creative because the LeTort didn't give up its trout willingly.
"Those people wrote about the stream when it was at its peak," Weigl says. "That alone would make the LeTort legendary in fly-fishing circles."
The resulting books carried the stories of the LeTort around the world. Recreational fly-fishermen — including a few famous actors, generals and politicians — began visiting the LeTort in hopes of coaxing a chubby brown trout to take a dry fly.
The stream's reputation remains strong, but Weigl guesses that most hobbyists would struggle to reel in any trout today.
While many area guides and recreational fishermen agree with that assessment, Rocky Stump does not. The South Middleton resident lives along the LeTort and fishes the stream several times a week. Fish were always tough to catch in the stream, Stump says, and today's trout are no more elusive.
"Having lived here on the stream, I know the fish are here," Stump says. "The trout are here, (the fly-fishermen) just have to learn how to catch them again. They want it to be easy."
Fish for a future president
Legend has it that the seeds for the LeTort's glory were planted more than 80 years ago when rumors circulated that a powerful politician would visit.
Brown trout, which originated in Europe, were introduced to the stream in preparation for a 1920 trip by Herbert Hoover, then the head of President Woodrow Wilson's Food Administration, historian Dave Wolf told The Sentinel in 1994.
Hoover "was expected to come here to fish and people were afraid he wouldn't catch anything," Wolf explained. "So they stocked the stream with brown trout."
Hoover didn't come, but the trout stayed and reproduced — which they usually do not do in American streams.
As the years went on, the trout and the stream's reputation grew.
Marinaro — who spent most of his life on the LeTort and has a section of the stream bank named after him — wrote a book called "Modern Dry Fly Code" that made a big splash in the 1960s.
Rumor has it that Fox and Marinaro once sat along the LeTort scratching their heads in an attempt to solve the challenge offered by waters filled with spectacular brown trout nearly impossible to catch.
They came up with solutions such as longer leaders and light tippets, and even pioneered thorax-style dry flies, since traditional Catskill dries didn't do the trick.
Marinaro, Fox and others ended up developing what they call the terrestrial patterns — inspired by ants, beetles, grasshoppers and crickets — that are used all over the world today.
"The LeTort and the Cumberland Valley is one of the cradles of fly-fishing in the country," says Fred Bohls, past president of the Cumberland Valley Chapter of Trout Unlimited. "It really had a big influence on how fly fishing has developed in this country."
Ed Shenk has spent more than 65 years fishing on the LeTort. In "Ed Shenk's Flyrod Trouting" he recounts a three-year pursuit of one LeTort lunker.
"We're not only concerned about the quality of the water," he says. "We're also concerned about the quality of the fishing, because the fishing is what made the stream famous.
"The quality of the stream right now is very poor. The number of fish are literally nonexistent in some places."
Three-pronged problem
Observers blame three environmental changes for the fish decline — vegetation, predation and low stream flows.
Healthy vegetation is crucial to trout habitat. In addition to giving the fish sufficient protective cover, vegetation is a key component in the food chain. A substantial number of aquatic insects feed on plant life — and the trout depend on those insects for food.
"There were always a lot of weeds in there and places for the fish to hide," says Tom Baltz, fishing guide. "The weeds are not in there like they were."
Weigl speculates that low stream flows are responsible for wiping out smaller fish in the LeTort, partly because food is harder to find.
"The stream where I live is as low as I have ever seen it" in recent years, says Weigl, who lives along the LeTort in Middlesex Township. "What I see now are bigger fish — and bigger fish that have been caught before are smarter fish."
As a result, there are very few fish near the stream's surface, he says.
"So you have to fish on the bottom of the stream and people don't like it," Weigl explains. "It's hard and most people aren't very good at it. Most people don't have the patience or the skills to be able to do it effectively. It's not a fun process."
Meanwhile, just as trout eat insects, herons eat trout.
Herons are a protected bird but are a chief predator of the trout in the LeTort. Bohls reports seeing dead trout along the banks that the birds had been plucked out of the water but couldn't completely consume.
"Herons are very abundant now compared to what they used to be," Baltz says. "And they're deadly, too."
Some fishermen are leery of Bonny Brook Quarry and B&W Quality Growers, a watercress farm, near the prime Heritage Trout Angling regulations area in South Middleton Township.
Each year, millions of gallons of groundwater are pumped into the stream from the limestone quarry, which has operated for more than 80 years.
Sandra Diehl, president of Union Quarries, declined comment about the quarry's effect on the stream.
Fishermen are more concerned about the watercress operation.
On May 17, 1981, large numbers of trout, fish, insects and other wildlife died as a result of an insecticide spill at the watercress beds near the headwaters.
The kill zone extended some three miles downstream to Carlisle Barracks.
After a monitoring period, the state Fish and Boat Commission opted against stocking fish to replenish the trout population in the LeTort, instead allowing the surviving wild fish to reproduce and repopulate the stream.
Stump lives along the LeTort next door to one of the watercress farms along Bonnybrook Road and says the business is a good neighbor to the LeTort.
"They try really hard to have no impact (on the stream)," he says. "They do a lot of spraying, but that's agriculture. You can't sell watercress with bug holes in it."
Healthy numbers
As far as the Fish and Boat Commission is concerned, the LeTort has a healthy trout population.
Commission spokesman Dan Tredinnick says electrical shock tests were performed in late August at three sites on the LeTort — near the quarry, downstream from Interstate 81 and immediately upstream from the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
The tests yielded trout of various sizes and ages, Tredinnick says. Fish varying from 2-16 inches were found. Most of them were brown trout.
"If we see young fish, that supports the idea that there is natural reproduction going on," he says. "There definitely is some natural reproduction going on there."
He adds the commission still is studying the test results.
No stocking has been done lately on the lower LeTort.
"We did do some fingerling stocking on the LeTort up through the mid-1990s but we haven't done any in recent years," Tredinnick says. "We stopped — we decided to see what it was going to do on its own."
The Fish and Boat Commission assessment supports Stump's theory of evolution. In other words, the fish have adapted and the old fly-fishing techniques are no longer successful.
"Their survival instincts are kicking in and they're staying hidden," Stump says. "If you're out early in the morning, you'll see them."
Coming Tuesday: A homeowner along the LeTort tells her story of fighting Home Depot and claims the development will ruin the quality of life associated with the stream.
