STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

The sun had barely risen above the foothills overlooking Gannett Road when a group of adults and children began walking through the water in the 45 Canal near Labrador Lane using their feet like soccer players to steer rainbow and brown trout upstream.

There, waiting for them, were other adults and youth holding two large nets stretched across the canal. As they drew the nets together around the fish, other fish jumped over the small diversion dam right into the net, the light of the sun glinting off their oily grey skin.

Several men carried the net, which was sagging under the weight of hundreds of 6- and 7-inch trout and a few Wood River Sculpin, to the side of the canal. There, they poured the fish into several five-gallon buckets which were then carried to a waiting Fish Rescue Tank mounted on a trailer.

“Every year the Big Wood River is diverted into various canals for irrigation purposes. And, when that happens, Water Master John Wright calls us and we come out and do these fish rescues,” said Ed Northen, a board member of the Hemingway Chapter of Trout Unlimited.

“We did an earlier rescue the first of July, which is one of the earliest we’ve ever done. It seems like the water is low everywhere.”

Indeed, although winter ended with a snowpack slightly above average, warm temperatures quickly melted the snow in the mountains. And a lack of rain meant it was quickly absorbed into the parched ground.

By July Fourth, the Big Wood River was running just half of its normal rate throughout the Wood River Valley.

One man poured each five-gallon bucket of fish into the fish tank slowly so another could count the fish.

Miles Sweek stood by with an electronic scanner that counted fish that anglers had tagged earlier in the season further upstream.

“We know where they were tagged. By seeing which canals they swim into, we can make a pitch for screens to keep the fish in the main channel,” he said. “If we can say 99 percent of the fish swim into a certain canal during two weeks in June, we can make a pitch for putting screens across that channel during those two weeks in June so we don’t have to rescue so many fish.

“We’d take care of putting the screens up and taking them down so the property owners don’t have to do any maintenance to remove debris that collects on the screens,” he added.

As Jim Wilkins watched the rescue, he was reminded of the first time he saw one—five years ago when his Wood River Valley relatives—all avid fishermen—invited him to a fish rescue.

“That was my introduction to the Hemingway Chapter of Trout Unlimited. I saw my kids, my grandkids, in the middle of it, and it made my heart sing that my grandkids were immersed in it and welcomed. This is what we do every year and it’s so rewarding. We can’t save all the fish but we can get our boots on the ground to do what we can to mitigate the effect.”

The Hemingway chapter also is involved in several community service projects, Wilkins added.

Members take fifth-graders to Hayspur Fish Hatchery near Picabo in early June where they teach them to fish while birders teach them to look for the owls and other birds.

“We teach them that, if they’re not going to eat the fish, they need to put them back in the river,” he said. “We also help Higher Ground teach fly fishing to firefighters and veterans. People of my era come from Boise and we take them fishing.”

By the end of the day, the rescuers had saved 3,704 trout, which they released into Magic Reservoir. That was more than triple the 1,034 fish they had rescued in early July from a channel that had dried up near Walker Sand and Gravel south of Bellevue. They’d released those fish into the Big Wood River near Stanton Crossing

But there would be no rest for the weary as they would be called out two days later to another fish rescue upstream from the one they’d just completed.

Eric Eberhard proudly pulled out picture of himself holding a 31-pound trout.

“I caught this at Magic Reservoir in winter. Who knows? Maybe it’s a trout we saved in one of our fish rescues.”