My honey hole is ruined

Mark W

Mark W

Well-known member
dont have pictures from last year but this used to be a free flowing stream. Many places to hunt from the shore. This year as you can see it is completely filled in. Last year the DNR removes a damnsending thousands of tons of silt downstream. You can see the results. If his us d to be 3-4 feet deep. Upstream was great trout fishing.

I’m giving it a go right now but not too promising.



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It sucks when you lose a good hunting spot. I lost my best tupelo swamps to water primrose and alligator weed. I empathize with you.
 
Dam was reaching it's useful life. Plan was to install silt traps, remove the dam and the rebuild. No silt traps were installed and once the dam was removed, the money to rebuild a new one disappeared. Funny ho that happens.

Mark
 
Similar instances recently in northeast PA, two popular lakes had very old (CCA) dams that had structural problems and didn't meet newer emergency spillway requirements.
Fish Commission drained them and now doesn't have the money to rebuild them to modern standards.

Who's the landowner along that stream section?
 
It varies. For the first few miles the State owns land on both sides. Down where I hunt the land is owned by two people (disputed with DNR on a certain stretch). One owner is a hunter and the other is a family associated with the Dayton’s if that name means anything to you.

Where the stream flows at the end is another lake created by another damn. I am guessing around 200 lakeshore owners. The lake below the removed dam has also suffered damage. We looked into buying a place on this lake a couple years back and am grateful we couldn’t get it all to work out. I wouldnt want to own lakeshore here any longer.

Mark
 
I don't know if anyone is familar with the Boardman river in lower Michigan but the DNR was working to restore it to a free flowing stream removing all the damns and impounds. A few years ago during the final draw down process at Brown Bridge Damn their was a catastrophic failure. The year before I had fished just below the damn and was in heaven watching 100's of fish feeding on the hatch. The next year I couldn't even stand in the same stretch due to all the sediment I was sinking in. It was all but a dead river.

I fished that stretch a couple miles farther down stream and caught some big browns ( which I kept) they were full of crayfish. I worked my way up a small tributary off that main river and caught a couple more which I kept. They were full of bugs. The flesh of the ones feeding on crayfish was pink was a very interesting topic at dinner with the family.

That river was severely damaged by that failure. Its healing now but its going to take a long time to heal perhaps long enough I wont see it. Free flowing streams are a great concept something I would still support in the right places ( like the boardman) but even when funding and manpower is available things still can go wrong.

Its a shame and really a tragedy to hear so many examples of it going wrong.
 
Thought you might like to see what the same place looked like last year. On the very first picture, the dry stream bed on the left side is the stream shown in this picture from some time back. It is so hard to believe that so much silt can make its way down many miles of stream and deposit itself here.




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Rob_F said:
I'm generally a "remove the dams" person, but you can't release 60 of wrong doing all at once!
Click to expand...

When that happens by accident, it is called a catastrophic event. Not sure what to call it except, sad, when it is done on purpose.
 
Mark, was your honey hole above the old dam, or below? And was it on the main channel, or a side channel or backwater? I can't tell if the change you show in the photos is the change from impounded conditions to dewatered, with a now much reduced stream channel, or accumulation of silt released into what was formerly a deep and wide free flowing channel below the dam. If the former, it looks about like I'd expect after a season for vegetation to get established--if the streams was really small before it was dammed. If the latter, I've never seen a situation where so much sediment was deposited downstream of a removed dam, but I work in a very different landscape. Either way, you lost a treasured duck spot and I feel your pain.

I've worked on a bunch of dam removals, and sediment management is always a concern. How to deal with it depends on all kinds of factors--how much sediment, is there contamination, how much of the sediment might move. Many dams store very little sediment, especially if they are on relatively steep streams in rocky country. Things are really different in the mid west where the rivers are often flatter and sand bottomed. That Boardman River disaster is a case study--literally--for people who do this work. Lots of screw ups on that one.
 
Honey hole is many miles below the removed dam.

In the first picture you are looking upstream. On the left side of that picture is wht used to be the main channel. The bottom picture is looking downstream right to the spot where the first picture was taken. The main channel used to be 4 feet deep or so. Now there is no water flowing as it has all been filled in with sediment. I didn’t think this would be possible but as I have hunted here for years I kno w every foot of this stream.

With this channel closed the stream is wandering into new locations. Where it used to be a trickle there is now a good size stream. Unfortunately is is far from where the ducks like to go.

The place I hunt is many miles from where the dam was removed. I have not taken the time this year to go upstream and see what else has changed. Maybe tomorrow.

Mark
 
Thanks. Sounds like a braided stream channel?

In any case, I'm very surprised that such a large amount of sediment was allowed to be released in an uncontrolled way.
 
Mark, my honey hole got torn up by the Rio Grande, 18 days before duck season was to open. I guess I prayed too hard for rain! The rancher told me that they received 3 1/2 inches in a very short period of time. Next summer when it is dry again, he will drive his Bobcat down there to fix it. There is some water in it so at least I can still hunt it. There is a lot of silt and that will remain an issue most likely.

I wish you well this season with the other areas you hunt.
Al
 
It's inconceivable that WiDNR would do something so ignorant.

The only reason I could see is if this was a channel that wasn't a "normal" channel...it wandered out of the normal channel due to the dam...but if this is miles downriver...that doesn't make sense either. And if you are miles downriver, that is a huge sediment load that got shoved downstream, not just to your segment...oof.

Was it accidental, or did they just let it rip?
 
It was the only channel after the dam so it was the main channel.

This was no accident. They had had meetings on it, studies etc.... We were told there would be sediment traps and diversions to prevent exactly what happened. Then the dam was to be removed and a new one built in its place. Old one was removed, all silt went downstream (no traps, no diversion) and now there is no money to rebuild the dam. Typical.

What is nice is the new areas that have opened up. Much harder to get to but there are new spots that ducks should enjoy. Went out last night and saw literally hundreds of ducks. Haven't seen this in a long time.

Mark
 
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