Fish Story

6-15-07 SHORT HILLS: I got back from Montana last night after flight delays on the last leg from ORD to EWR. Tonight we heard the NY Philharmonic at NJPAC. They did the Semiramide Overture by Rossini, Shubert’s Third Symphony, and Dvorak’s Fifth Symphony. It was a summer cooler of a program and done deliciously. The theme in the first movement of the Dvorak is very melodic and very familiar, probably been stolen several times.

Some follow-up on the fishing trip: The Big Horn River has 6,000 trout per mile, according to the wildlife agencies. So, over the thirteen miles of river we cruised every day, and some sections we repeated four or five times, we went over or by at least 78,000 trout and in four days-312,000 trout, not to mention the other fish species. If a hundred fishermen catch thirty trout per day, repeated daily for the season, 8 months, each fish gets to meet a lot of people in a year.

The river discharge is at an all-time low. Discharge is a measure of how much water is flowing through the river bed and is expressed in cubic ft. per second [CFS]. One measures the width of the bed and multiplies by the average depth at the same place for the area of the bed at that point [square feet] and multiples that area by the velocity of the water as measured at that spot, usually over several days, in feet per second to get CFS. The current, no pun intended, discharge is 1200 CFS. It used to be in the 7-10,000 range at this time of year. That would make a wider, deeper and faster river than the one we saw. Several years of drought are responsible for the discharge decline. Climate change, anyone?

The flies look like, well, flies. The most popular is called the Ray Charles, “cuz even a blind man could catch fish with it.”


Cottonwoods and Russian olive trees on the Bighorn.

Blue Heron.

Merganser with lady Mallard,