By TRAVIS FAHEY

BRISTOL — Twenty-six years ago, a 7-pound native rainbow trout, a beautiful river and dreams of fishing clean, promising waters brought Pete Diminico to the Bristol area.

Now, the hope that the natural fish population in that river will survive increasing fishing pressure, rapidly eroding banks and sub-par growth along its banks keeps him involved in efforts to protect the New Haven.

“We’ve always supported having a wild fish population and put-and-take or stocking programs, but we recognize that having a healthy wild trout population reflects a healthy river, which is important,” Diminico says. 

Diminico is the president of the New Haven River Anglers Association, a nonprofit group of fishermen founded in 1981, whose mission is to preserve and promote safe and sustainable fishing in the New Haven River. The group has worked for two decades to improve the river and, in 1997, was in its heyday with programs in place to monitor pollution in the river and  working relationships with the Water Quality Division of the state Agency of Natural Resources and the U.S. Forest Service.

In 1996, the anglers received a grant to help bolster the aquatic habitat in the river through the introduction of miniature aquatic ecosystems made by sinking logs in the river, which is comparable to efforts by marine biologists to introduce coral reefs by sinking ships in the ocean. The grant also allowed the group to shore up banks and promote growth along the section of the river where the project took place — a 1,200-foot section near Carlstrom Road in Bristol — which helps protect the river from high sediment levels and provides greater diversity in the river’s food chain.

The project was feted as a new chapter in the history of the river, one that would help push it along a road of self-sustainability. But that chapter didn’t last long. 

HIT BY FLOODS

The floods of 1998 rewrote the book. The group is now in the midst of an effort to make up the ground lost when the high spring runoff roared down the bed of the river, destroying habitat, changing the course of the river and leaving any previous efforts to introduce new habitat completely destroyed.

“We were on the right track before the flood. We had more canopy as a result of planting and preserving the river’s banks over the span of two decades. We had a good source of springs, which helped keep the trout (cool) in the summer, but now the river has taken a different route,” he says.

The floods widened the river, destroying much of the vegetation that kept the banks in place. Now, the banks erode into the river with disconcerting regularity, introducing dangerously high amounts of sediment to the river bed. Sediment destroys the eggs of spawning trout and snuffs out vegetation and insect larvae.

As the river has become wider, it has become shallower in many places, which provides less habitat for the fish and causes its waters to run detrimentally fast with even the smallest rain storms.

Though the damage that has been done has combined with heavier fishing than ever before to create a river ecosystem that hangs in the balance, Diminico is certain that the river will survive the adversities and once again become a great source for natural populations of trout.

NEW EFFORTS

Diminico’s positive outlook is admittedly one part blind optimism and two parts faith, but recently, a strategy aimed at increasing the size and number of natural trout in the river in the mid 1980s has been resurrected.

Beginning this year, a three-mile section of the river stretching from the South Street bridge in Bristol to the bridge on Munger Street in New Haven will fall under special fishing regulations introduced by the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife. These regulations set limits on the size and number of fish that can be kept per fisherman.

Under the new regulations, fish between the sizes of 10 and 16 inches are protected. Fishermen may only keep two fish per day, only one of which may be above the 16-inch maximum.

The new rules follow a no-kill regulation set in 1986 for a 3.5-mile section of the river along Route 116 that failed due to poor research. Diminico says that section of the river was poorly fished, which in turn meant little change in the population of large trout. But the new regulations target an area of the river that is highly fished and hosts a wide variety of riffles, holes and deep pockets of water that are prime locations for trout. 

Matt Dickerson, a Bristol resident who has fished the river for 12 years, says the new regulations will help increase the variety of fish available to anglers, but more needs to be done to revitalize the native trout population.

“It’s certainly beneficial to the natural trout population. Less stocking of fish means less chance to introduce disease and introduce competition, so the less stocking we do, the better ... But I think there needs to be more effort to rebuild the canopy,” he says.

Diminico agrees, and efforts to rebuild the habitat in and around the river, he says, aren’t too far down the road. Another wildlife project similar to the one done in 1997 is slated to begin this summer or the next near the Old Palmer’s Court trailer park off of Route 116. That wildlife project will take a similar focus to its predecessor, with efforts to shore up the banks and introduce ecosystems taking center stage.

Diminico says he is also cautiously optimistic about the prospect of the Army Corps of Engineers and the town of Bristol entering into an agreement that would bring a massive river repair project from the Lathrop Bandmill to the Palmer’s Court bridge. The details of that project are still being worked on by engineers. Diminico says if the New Haven River Anglers can have some input into the design of the project, it could be another gain in the effort to improve the river’s ecosystem and population of native trout.

Any efforts to help the river with the healing process will only speed up what would happen naturally, he says.

“Rivers realign and purge themselves. We have polluted them for years, but they have a way of healing. The New Haven River will come back and improve and purge itself,” he says. “But anything we do now will only help speed up that process.”