Saskatchewan lakes full of trout in time for fishing season

The Fort Qu’Appelle Fish Culture Station once again is giving anglers in Saskatchewan a chance at success.

Each year, the station adds a large supply of fish to lakes across Saskatchewan. According to its website, the facility can produce up to 80 million fish.

Nelson Berg is one of the workers who helps drop off the fish in lakes in the province. He gave The Greg Morgan Morning Show a little taste of what he does.

“Over the whole stocking season, we’re going to a wide variety of places around the province. We have about 140 lakes and rivers that we stock every year with trout,” Berg said.

“We stocked about 450,000 trout out into the lakes around Saskatchewan and we’re just getting into our maintenance phase now. So we’re doing a lot of disinfection and cleaning.”

The fish culture station workers carry the fish in large trucks across the province.

“We got two hauling trucks that we use that are Ford F-150s with flat decks on them. Each one has a tank on it that has four compartments in it with about 100-gallon capacity for each one,” Berg said.

“Depending on the size of fish we can haul approximately one pound of fish per gallon of water … Small fish, we can haul more, upwards of 20(,000 to) 25,000 fish at a time. Then if the fish are a little bit bigger then obviously it reduces our capacity as far as numbers go.”

Staff at the station raise the fish from egg to adulthood and then release them in lakes to enhance fishing and fish populations provincewide.

The main types of fish the station work with are walleye, a variety of trout (rainbow, brown, brook, lake, tiger and splake) and northern pike.

The Fort Qu’Appelle Fish Culture Station isn’t offering in person tours right now, but has a virtual one for people to check out.

Payton Zillich, 650 CKOM