Kern Valley Canyon Connection Community Forums

High river temps exceeding 80 degrees have made it difficult to keep trout alive at the hatchery. When trout are this stressed they often die when transported for stocking. Stocking was suspended for August. The high river temps along with facility work at the hatchery will mean no stocking for several weeks. Fishing has been tough and even if you want to catch and release the bigger fish they are very suseptable to lethal exhaustion. Smaller fish can survive higher water temps but even they can succomb. Try and defer your next trip until after Oct 1st to give what is left in the river a chance to recover and make it to latter this fall. 2012 resulted in the lowest snow pack in decades and requires drastic measures to sustain the trout population on the Upper Kern for future fishing when things improve.
Thanks!

Thanks for the info flyboy. It's much appreciated.

This would explain my inability to catch any decent fish a few weeks ago *wink-wink! That's it, I'll blame it all on the river conditions...

The hatchery was getting a lot of pressure to try and stock again even with a lot of work to upgrade the facility is ongoing. The lousy Labor Day catching really caused concern for the business community so they tried to stock earlier this week 9/4/12. Unfortunately most of the trout stocked went belly up. So the river temps are still too high. They may try again in a couple of weeks but the catching will continue to suffer for some time on the upper kern river. One wonders why they don't stock Lake Isabella where the water is cooler at depth?