There are 500 trout in Shields Lake. You can eat them — if you can catch them.
Turkey time is over; now it’s all about the trout.
On Monday morning, staffers with Virginia’s Department of Wildlife Resources flung roughly 500 brown and rainbow trout into Byrd Park’s Shields Lake, the first of five restockings that will take place over the next few months.
Why are they doing this? Because, as Statewide Hatchery Superintendent Brendan Delbos said, if the people can’t come to the fish, Virginia will bring the fish to the people.
“Most of the waters that we stock are in the western part of the state, but obviously not everyone’s got the ability or the time to travel two, three hours out to Nelson County or Southwest Virginia,” he said. “We just want to make sure that everyone has got access to these fish and these opportunities.”
For over a century, the state has been stocking Shields Lake with fish of various kinds for Richmonders to enjoy catching. As far back as the fall of 1930, the Richmond Times-Dispatch was recording the addition of 8,000 bream, 2,000 juvenile big-mouthed bass and 25 rock bass to Shields, along with “a number of pond roaches” intended to keep the adults from eating the young.
Today, stocking duties fall under the Department of Wildlife Resources through its Urban Fishing Program. Species like striped bass and walleye are added to the lake in the warmer months, while the cold-loving trout is transported from the state’s Montebello hatchery in the late fall and winter, when it can survive in Shields’ fairly shallow depths.
“The sole intent here is to create what we call a put-and-take fishery,” said Delbos. “We put the fish in and the anglers take them out, bring them home and create a delicious dinner.”
And while some Richmonders may be wary about eating fish from the James, Delbos said the trout in Shields are safe to eat, coming as they do from “some of the cleanest, coldest, clearest water in the state.”
The anglers were clearly eager to get their hands on the fish Monday morning, when about a dozen watched from the edge of the lake as DWR staffers scooped hundreds of wriggling trout out of tanks on a truck driven up from Montebello and deposited them into the water using nets and a flick of the wrist. Delbos estimated they would get two and a half to three weeks of “good-quality fishing” before the next restocking.
Getting the trout onto a fisherman’s line can take patience — and the right bait, said members of RVA Anglers, a community that member Connor Puckett described as “a big group of people that gets together and fishes together.”
Trout are “really picky when it comes to what they want to eat,” said fisherman Joey Cornell. Lures sometimes work, or “power bait,” a sticky, brightly colored substance that his mother, Dawn Cornell, described as “Play-Doh for trout.”
However finicky the trout might be on culinary matters, the anglers were not. DWR regulations for Shields Lake allow fishers with a license to take up to four trout per day, and the Cornells and Puckett enthusiastically described various methods of preparing a catch.
For Joey Cornell, deep frying was the way to go.
“Just fillet them and then you just bread ’em, throw ’em in a cast-iron skillet with some oil, and that’s all you need,” he said. “It’s fantastic.”
Contact Reporter Sarah Vogelsong at svogelsong@richmonder.org
