A High-Water Trip To The Flint Today

It rained about 4 inches here on New Year's Eve into New Year's Day, and the rivers all flooded. Today we went out to the Flint River to run the driftnets, since it's the new moon. The water was higher than ever, but not quite too high. We tried to set a driftnet at one of our standard places, but the high, fast water quickly tore a side sleeve and it started to disintegrate. The water was probably moving almost a meter/second. The picture below shows Robert, Jeremy and Brian grabbing parts of it before it disappeared downstream.

So, we set the other driftnet in a quieter area that still had a current of about 0.4 meters/second, a pretty good pace. It still took three of us at a time to hold it in place. Below is a picture of the drift being transferred to a jar at the end of an hour. With six people taking turns, this wasn't so bad.