i’ve been fishing in trough creek park in PA, where the majority of trout are stocked, and i have seen a couple of good hatche in the past weeks. but i have seen no rising trout, i am wondering if the is a product of the stocked trout? does it take them a while to ajust to stream life(eg. taking flies) or am i missing something? :?
From my expirience the trout stocked in Pennsyltucky ain’t too bright. I mean they are fish - trout even but I guess no one ever told them what the real trout is supposed to do. For firat few days after stocking I mostly use streamers. Sometime I will tie a midge of very small nyph as a dropper. Most hits will come on the streamer. After few days I will start switching to more and more nymphs and even some dries.
I gues it takes few days for the fish to switch from ground horse diet to the food real trout is supposed to eat…
And when it all fails then you can always join taboons of power bait fisherman… :shock:
I have always had the impression that only carryover hatchery trout start feeding and acting like native trout.
Of course no one has ever told me EXACTLY how long it takes a hatchery trout to settle in.
I think when hatchery trout are dumped in the river or reservoir, they are very vulnerable because they are disoriented and nervous. Birds catch them because the trout still relate to the surface, like at the hatchery ponds.
Doug
The best thing to catch hatchery trout on while still flyfishing is an egg fly. Some will look down their noses at you, but what the heck…
hey guys, thanks for the replies. i was out again and caught a ‘bow and a brown on a PTN, so i guess what im gettin’ at is if the trout are takin’ nymphs shouldn’t the also be taking drys?
No. The trout could be feeding only on nymphs or emergers. You can fish dry flies if you want though.
Doug
No, huh? oh well 
, i guess ill keep hopin’ for those sthat do surface. thanks for the insights, apreciate it 
Fish a good floating dry fly with a dropper and see what happens.
i have always caught trout right out of the truck in planted lakes with streamers(i.e. woolly buggers, leeches etc.) and nymphs(ptn, hares ear,etc.) and even a couple with dries :shock:
but i don’t know if its is different for freshly stocked trout in streams
well that was of no help :lol:
chris
The reason you catch more freshly stocked trout with wet/sinking flies is when the trout are fed at the hatchery they eat their pellets UNDER the surface. It takes time but eventually they will start eating bugs, but many stocked trout don’t make it through one season.
Doug
dshock,
i know what you mean they never last in the local lakes, alll of them either become bass food or they just die off :?
dshock,
i know what you mean they never last in the local lakes, alll of them either become bass food or they just die off
Around here most of stocked trout are put and take. Trout water are selected on the basis of water quality not the temperature.
Since by the end of June most of the lakes have water temperature above 80 degrees trout cannot survive. These fish are stocked so that people can take them and eat them. There are a few streams that have water cool enough year round but only few of them support enough trout for the masses. If you are die hard fly fisherman and you do know what are you doing than you can catch them year round, however if you want to catch a lot of fish in very short period of time than you go after stocked fish and that will last till the end of May or so.
around here its based on water temp. they usually stop the planting of trout when the water temp. reaches 60 degrees but thats good for the fish!
the last plant i was at they planted some 7 pound fish 5pound fish and smaller. they were all stacked up against the aerator breathing the fresh cold water coming in but when the aerator turned off most or all the 7 pound fish went belly up and died :shock: and the guys who work there have counted 35 dead trout in the past 2 days :shock: ! that will be the last plant for sure!!!
I think this is just a Pennsylvania thing, stocking fish in habitats that can’t support them year round. I’ve never seen the logic to stocking thousands of trout in a body of water that will be like a hot tub in July, but our Fish and Game Commission does it every year. I mostly agree with MikieFinn except that I think they sell a lot of fishing licenses here to people who think it’s great to stand shoulder to shoulder with a hundred other people, just on the chance you might catch a 24 inch trout that someone dumped in yesterday. To me that’s not really fishing… I’d rather head upstream a couple of miles, fight the brush and the fly-eating trees, to catch a couple of 8 or 9 inch fish instead. But again, that’s just me.
When white settlers first came to Pennsylvania, it was all wooded, the streams were full of brook trout. If I had my way, the money used for stocking trout would go into restoring some of our stream areas to their original state. However, I’m sure there are millions of fishing licenses sold every spring to people who’d rather have a wide open space two steps from their car where they can fish for 1 or 2 weeks out of the year.