Estill Fork Between Rain

We went out Sunday morning to our site on Estill Fork to run the drift net and collect shiners. It's been raining daily for 5 or 6 days now, and Estill Fork was a lot higher than our last trip in August. I'd guess that it overflowed Saturday night, judging from the wrack lines around the low bridge, but luckily for us the level had dropped by Sunday morning. A lot of the plant growth in the stream channel was carried away by high water. We calculated the flow rate at a foot/second at the drift net site, compared to 0.8 feet/second last month. Needless to say there was a lot of material trapped in the net over about 80 minutes. With higher water it was also easier to catch telescope shiners, in particular, since they like to hang out in scour holes which are actually scour holes again. We also caught a single blotchside logperch in one of those scour holes. We left after about 2 hours, and soon drove into a cloudburst, so we were lucky to go out in a lull.

I still haven't figured out how to get pictures off of my phone, but I have some good ones(!).