Trucks filled with fish are crisscrossing Pa. to help stock creeks ahead of fishing season

Trout can get carsick.

That’s why millions of rainbow, golden, brook, and brown trout have been crisscrossing Pennsylvania in large trucks on empty stomachs for the last month. They’re parked outside Sheetz, Rutter’s, and a few Wawas while drivers grab a coffee, use the bathroom, and do a fish check. They’re at rest stops and traffic lights and, eventually, wind up in buckets carried down to creeks by volunteers in every corner of the Commonwealth.

“Oh my gosh, look at the tail,” volunteer Kyle Kocher, 45, said about a particularly large rainbow trout that barely fit in a bucket.

“It’s huge,” his daughter, Marley, squealed.

Then, with a “here we go,” he tossed the bucketful of fish into a stretch of Unami Creek in Quakertown, Bucks County. One large golden trout, a bright color morph of the rainbow trout, swam in circles in a deep hole on the creek.

Up and down the creek, about 50 volunteers, young and old, were doing the same thing with buckets, all of them gathering on this Friday afternoon in late March to help the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission prepare for an annual rite of spring: opening day of trout season.

As of April 5, starting at 8 a.m., anyone with a valid fishing license can try to catch them. In Philadelphia, the Wissahickon and Pennypack Creeks are both stocked with trout, and anglers will be lining up early to get an open spot.

“They put some real big ones in there,” said Mark Cooper, a Bucks County fisherman who’s been volunteering to dump trout for 20 years.

While Western states like Montana and Colorado might make for more scenic trout fishing photos, Pennsylvania’s rivers and streams are world-renowned for both their fish and history. The state’s fisheries management program dates back more than 140 years. The commission’s first mission was to repopulate American shad, a once-ubiquitous fish that spawned en masse in the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers. Fish were transported via horse-and-buggy in the earliest days, then by train, before today’s custom-fitted flatbed trucks with aerated tanks.

There are 15 hatcheries in the state, often in areas with direct access to clean waterways. About half of the hatcheries produce approximately 4 million trout in total for fishermen and, ideally, to bolster some existing populations. The state produces a slew of other fish too, everything from the largemouth bass and their smaller, feisty cousins, the smallmouth bass, to the elusive, toothy muskellunge or “muskie.”

The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission estimates that recreational fishing adds $1 billion to the state’s economy. The trout stocking program is mostly user-funded by fishing license sales, and the state issued more than 790,000 of them last year.

The trout that were tossed into Unami Creek started their morning 120 miles southwest, at the Huntsdale State Fish Hatchery in Carlisle, Cumberland County. The 167-acre hatchery was opened in 1932 with water drawn from nearby springs and waterways, including the famous Yellow Breeches, a clear and cold stream known for its trout fishing.

Andrew Wagner, the hatchery manager at Huntsdale, said trout are cold-water species that require more attention than typical Pennsylvania fish. While only the brook trout is native to Pennsylvania, browns and rainbows have long been established and are part of the fishing culture.

“Other species can go up to 75 / 80 degrees and still survive,” he said in the hatchery’s visitor center.

Just before 8 a.m., about a dozen Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission employees, most with a biology background, gathered for a meeting to discuss the day’s planned stocking over cookies and coffee. The rush of trout stocking season was almost over, and outside, the hatchery’s many concrete “raceway” holding tanks were growing sparse.

“They’ll be all rainbows from there on out,” Joe Tusing, Huntsdale’s foreman, told the crew after looking at some paperwork.

The crew was broken down into loaders and stockers. The stockers would be dispersing over the region in their trucks, meeting volunteers at various waterways with a brigade of buckets to release the trout.

“We’ve done 305,000 fish here in about five weeks and tomorrow is our last day of preseason,” Tusing said.

The loaders would be getting wet and slimy, donning waders and rain slickers to hop into the raceways to scoop up hundreds of pounds of fish into a conveyor that leads up to the trucks.

“Yeah, it’s a workout,” one aquarist said while scooping up a heavy net full of fish.

The trucks can carry approximately 3,500 pounds of fish to each stocking location. Aquarist Eric Bitzer drove the load of trout from the hatchery to Bucks County. He took a rest stop at Cabela’s, an outdoors superstore in Berks County, to check on the fish. The store is a fisherman’s paradise and some visitors have questions when they see his truck.

“Yeah, they want to know if there’s any big ones in there and where I’m going,” Bitzer said.

Just before noon, Bitzer pulled the truck into a fire station parking lot near Unami Creek and, about 15 minutes later, it was full of volunteers. Local schools were off on this Friday and fathers, grandfathers, and uncles brought them all down to dump trout.

“We’re just big fans of fishing and we eat a lot of trout,” said Jesse Killion, a knife maker who came to carry buckets with his son, Jonah.

After a briefing from a Fish and Boat officer, the convoy headed down to the creek.

“You want to toss the trout. Don’t dip the bucket in the water. We don’t want our buckets touching the water,” Officer Travis Miller told the crowd, in order to avoid cross contamination back at the hatchery.

The trout are fed with pellets for most of their time at Huntsdale and are generally ready to be stocked when they reach about 11 inches. A few trophy “lunkers” are mixed in too. The feedings stop a few days before they head out, though. It’s not to make them hungrier for fishermen, though that helps on opening day when the fishermen can be elbow-to-elbow.

All the sloshing around in trucks on Pennsylvania highways, it turns out, is not good for their tummies.

“Yeah, they’d just chuck all that food up and really foul up the water in the tanks,” Bitzer said.

Fishermen should come to opening day hungry, too. Rainbows go great with a little thyme, dill, and garlic butter.

Fishing licenses can be bought online and in person at some locations. Click here for more info. Out-of-state residents can also buy licenses, though they cost more.

Click here for a directory of all the creeks, streams, and lakes where trout are stocked in Pennsylvania.