Woodland Trout Fund

Every year around this time Woodland Valley's own troutmeister, Mike O'Neil, sends out a letter and asks for contributions to the Woodland Trout Fund. This fund provides the money each year to stock the WV stream with lovely brown trout. The year is especially important because of the damage to the stream done by Hurricane Irene. Here is Mike's letter. If you feel inclined to donate the information is on the bottom of the message.

Woodland Trout 2012
The Brook in its Healing

I turned 70 years old this January. And while I boast publicly that 70 is the new 50, my secret heart assures me that in reality I’m slowly slouching toward decrepitude. When I wade the Woodland Brook, my legs know the truth. I can’t skip from rock to rock as I once did when I was young. My grandchildren and their young friends put me in mind of myself back then, for they do it without a care.

I was first introduced to Woodland Brook at age 9. It had suffered a terrible storm the year before, and its landscape was as flat as a pancake. There seemed to be little life left in the old girl. But there was. Leadwing coachmen were there after the rains and the exoskeletons of Isonychia Bicolor dotted the rocks in profusion.

My family was not discouraged. We had come to the valley from the Pacific Northwest in search of trout, and by God we found them. The pull of ancient memory brought spawning browns and rainbows up from the Ashokan and the Brook Trout in Woodland’s cold headwaters continued their stubborn residence.

Over the years I have come to know the brook’s bends and curves, her changing ripples and pocketed pools—her disruptions, and then again, on certain days and nights—her perfection. I think you may understand my abiding connection to her best, by knowing that, each in their own time, we strew my father’s and mother’s ashes into the stream. Eventually I plan to have mine tossed in there too.

Once again nature has seen fit to show us who’s boss. I need not tell you how roughly she treated us last September. The streambed was reinvented again and the darling brook is as flat as a pancake.

However, particular streamside agents of mine report that so far this winter the brook has not been upset by overwhelming snow and ice. Can it mean that the some of the trout that underwent the terrible drubbing in September’s overwhelming catastrophe still live? The Troutmeister hopes so. And YOU can help put more trout into the Brook.

I ask you to help re-trout Woodland Brook with the lovely, fat and sassy browns from our friends at the Beaverkill Trout Hatchery by sending a check made out to THE WOODLAND TROUT FUND to: Mike O’Neil, 101 Rambling Road, Vernon, CT 06066.

MANY THANKS
Mike O’Neil—Troutmeister