For the last six weekends I have been making trips to the connecticut river for sampling.

Here are my trip reports.

My first trip started out at the lower Ashuelot, then I moved to a location on the connecticut. My main goal of this quest was to find two fish I heard of being in the Connecticut River drainage. The spottail shiner and the silvery minnow. Living on the drainage and not finding them in my more usual waters I decided it was best to move closer to the source.

My first stop was below the first dam on the Ashuelot. This dam blocks upward movement from the Connecticut making for wonderful smallmouth fishing in the early spring and I got my first walleye here. As the divider between waters with direct Connecticut influence and further upstream it seemed like a good fist sampling spot.



Most of what I caught were juvenile shiners. If you wonder why I didn't take up the offer to write this as an american currents issue it is this. I suck at IDing juvenile shiners and the answers I get on ID forums are uncertain. Give me a mature blacknose dace, longnose dace, creek chub, fallfish, or golden shiner and I can ID it. Give me a juvenile and I have no idea. I swear we need a field guide to immature cyprinids.

They are brownish with a black stripe so could be creek chubs or blacknose dace.





I also found some tesselated darters under a rock in a rocky area. Ask me a year ago I would tell you that you can only find tesselates in muddy streams as that is the only place I found them. But earlier this year I found some in a riffle and this one was from a rocky area. Though they seem most numerous in muddy streams I guess they are sort of habitat generalists.



I also found a baby smallmouth here (thanks guys for the ID help).

I then moved onto the connecticut river in a placid almost lake like stretch above the Vernon dam.



Of course I found alot of mysterious juvenile shiners no one on the ID boards were sure of. A couple guessed fallfish but really their white lined markings match nothing I know. Did I mention that juvenile shiners annoy me?





I tried sweeping my dipnet through the cattails and found a blacknose dace. If you asked me before I'd have said blacknose dace need current so finding one deep in a cattail bed in still water would be unlikely, but as always if I make an assumption about a fish a fish will prove me wrong.



Among my minnows was a white sucker. I feel embarrassed on not noticing one was different until someone on the ID forum pointed it out.



Going out deeper to the weed beds found me more tesselated darters



And here is some of the vegetation they were in. Not sure what kind of plant it is.

For my second trip back above the dam curious on those mystery shiners. Instead I found a very different shiner type this time around. I am not sure what it is as it is a juvenile, at first I thought fallfish or maybe common, but the pointed back is making me think golden. (correct id's would be appreciated as it keeps my photo album from being full of misidentifications, i am pretty sure the fallfish guess posted their is wrong)







I also found a baby smallmouth

My third trip was below the Vernon Dam where the water level was very low. Some spots resembled mud flats at low tide.



Their were mussel beds everywhere, some submerged, others exposed to the air.











Their were also odd tracks in the sand, what could make these?



A quick look showed they were mussel tracks, I didn't realize mussels were motile before.



Their were plenty of weedbeds here where I found my fish.

Just about every scoop through them got baby rock bass. Some looked strangely transparent.





I also got an unusual minnow, could it be... YES, a spottail. (thank you ID forum).

It shined blue in the net like a common.



had a distinctive stripe.



and a spot tail (not an ID unto itself as juvenile fallfish sometimes have spot tails too).



here it is in all its glory



and with a rock bass.



I also got a crayfish



I also got a smallmouth (I think the second smallmouth pic was misplaced and goes here).

And the largest fish I ever successfully caught in a net (I had a larger pickerel once but it escaped my seine). A big rock bass.





Afterwards I tried some snorkeling (and when the strap holding my snorkel to my mask broke breath holding) and observed sunfish and perch prowling the edge of the weed beds. And schools of shiners with black stripes on their sides swarming around me when I disturbed the weeds and the occasional big golden shiners zooming in as well.

My fourth trip (I just realized my title is wrong, I only had five trips to the Connecticut so far this year) was uneventful. The water level was high and I only saw one fish, a small largemouth swimming just below the surface that looked like it was having trouble with the current. I slipped the net under if to catch it but it jumped out and swam off as if it had no trouble. I tried snorkling (I got a new mask for a new snorkel strap) and saw nothing, the productive weed beds are in deeper water now, though I found an unusual cold area where another river flowed in that I was disappointed didn't have fish. This cold area flowed in by an island that was a point a week ago. I also got to experience the force of two states worth of water pushing against me as the current was stronger now. I could see why this river can be a danger to swimmers at times, it can be powerful.

I also saw a heron but by the time i seen it, it was too dark to get a decent picture.

This highlights an issue I find odd with rivers that an effect of a dam modifies. Rivers are very changable. Areas can go from deep to shallow in days, from fast to slow in similar time frames. And here below a dam it can happen much faster. Current, depth, and habitat are all changable as are species. In other rivers I have noticed finding species one day and not the next, and I know a spot on the ashuelot that has fry from spring to fall but not the same species, different ones move in and out of the area at different times.

On my last trip the river went down a bit and was midway between the recent high and low. I tried dipnetting but had no luck, the weedbeds were reachable but a bit too deep to sample effectively.

I decided to snorkel, I checked out the place where the cold stream met the river but didn't snorkel their as it was too close to some fishermen, but did see an odd phenomenon. Fog flowing over the river where cold stream met warm.



I was disappointed I saw no fish their last time (or anywhere else), and I really wanted to explore the cold meets warm area again. It is a unique habitat, and may explain an oddity I saw a couple years ago. A big brook trout, biggest one I seen caught, caught below the dam in what should be warm water that would keep them from growing that big (or at all). A cold refuge nearbye makes so much sense in explaining that. (this is a less dramatic cold area before the dam where a smaller stream flows in creating a cold layer under the warm water).

On the way back I passed a dead eel left on the shore.



I decided to try my Olympus x-360 WP waterproof camera. It is supposed to be good up to ten feet but experience shows me it sucks underwater. Still I tried to get underwater pics through statistics. If I take enough pictures one HAS to be good by chance alone. So I tried dozens of photos, first with the flash (those were the better ones). Then when the flash made the shiners skiddish when I aimed the camera at them I tried without it. I had 6 pics where their were a possible fish in the picture, three of which it was a definate fish, and one came out sort of decent.

A young smallmouth bass.



Here it is enlarged and color enhanced



I also got a sunfish pic



Enlarged and color enhanced shows it is a rock bass, or maybe a smallmouth. This is what i get for getting a cheap camera.



Finally a shiner.



Well it COULD be a shiner, not sure you can ID it as anything with this



I also saw a heron land and then take off again (too many people around) and I heard it. It honked like a goose. I don't think I ever heard one make noise before but I seen lots of them.

So their is my big report full of fish pics, with a few crayfish, plants, and underwater pics thrown in. Sorry the text wasn't that great. A mix between remembering past trips and it being late probably kept it from being as entertaining as it should have been.

So their is my big report full of fish pics, with a few crayfish, plants, and underwater pics thrown in. Sorry the text wasn't that great. A mix between remembering past trips and it being late probably kept it from being as entertaining as it should have been.

Awesome job catching the above mentioned fish. I was with the wife visiting my in-laws on VT/NH border( Newbury, VT - Woodsville, NH area ) during Labor Day weekend and decided to get a VT 3 day non-resident fishing license so I could do some sampling. I threw my minnow trap in the Connecticut R. my first night there. Found 3 juvenile Rock Bass in it the next day. The same day I found a small, calm stream running through a field in Newbury. So I threw the trap in once more and did some fishing. I caught a lot of large creek chubs on my lures, I was trying for Brook Trout. In my trap I caught the following species: Creek Chub, Golden Shiner, Blacknose Dace, and some very fine large specimens of Common Shiner. I did have a seine net with me but I never used it, probably would have caught a sculpin or two. Next time I go up I want to try the western half of VT.

Awesome job catching the above mentioned fish. I was with the wife visiting my in-laws on VT/NH border( Newbury, VT - Woodsville, NH area ) during Labor Day weekend and decided to get a VT 3 day non-resident fishing license so I could do some sampling. I threw my minnow trap in the Connecticut R. my first night there. Found 3 juvenile Rock Bass in it the next day. The same day I found a small, calm stream running through a field in Newbury. So I threw the trap in once more and did some fishing. I caught a lot of large creek chubs on my lures, I was trying for Brook Trout. In my trap I caught the following species: Creek Chub, Golden Shiner, Blacknose Dace, and some very fine large specimens of Common Shiner. I did have a seine net with me but I never used it, probably would have caught a sculpin or two. Next time I go up I want to try the western half of VT.

I also did some snorkeling in this stream that I think runs adjacent to the Kancamangus Hwy. I know it was just up the road from Woodsville and you take a right instead of heading north to Littleton. I was going to try snorkeling a spot on this river called the Swiftwater covered bridge, but there were over a hundred people there. Not ideal for snorkeling. But then I found a spot a liitle further downstream with a couple of nice deep pools. Saw some the same species I had caught plus what i thought might have been white suckers. All in all, a pretty productive trip.