Georgia Drought Squeezes Georgia Trout

LAKE BURTON, Ga. -- From the lakes to the rivers, the summer recreation season is here. If you'd "rather be fishing" this summer, you might be wise to heed this warning: don't wait too long.

These trout are at the Lake Burton hatchery are conditioned to associate what they see through their window of water with food.

But those meals are about to come to a close.

The trout are about to join thousands of others who'll be stocked into Georgia streams for the Memorial Day holiday.

In normal years, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources stocks about three quarters of its hatchery fish by the fourth of July.

This isn't a normal year.

"It is changing to a fairly large extent," said Perry Thompson, head of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources stocking program. "This year we'll probably have 90 to 95 percent of our fish stocked by July fourth."

This year, as with last, the specter of drought hangs darkly over this pristine environment.

It's still relatively early in the season and yet north Georgia creeks and streams are at least a third lower than they ought to be.

Last year, the drought caused the state's trout stocking program to change on the fly. This year Perry Thompson is ready.

"Going into this year," explains the DNR's Thompson. "We had a strategy in place. What we called our, our drought management plan. And we sat down, took what we had learned from the previous years."

Thompson's team evaluated the state's trout hatcheries to see which had the most water and the largest capacity.

"We really have to pack fish into our hatcheries," Thompson said. "That have a good water supply. And cool water. So we're playing catch up."

The drought makes raising trout harder. There are slightly fewer fish to stock this year. And overall they are smaller.

"If it's hot and dry," Thompson points out, "we're not able to stock as many fish.

The number of people who went trout fishing in Georgia last year equaled the combined populations of Savannah and Brunswick, or about a hundred and forty thousand people.

Trout fishing in Georgia generates a $186 million in revenue a year.

The drought doesn't just put pressure on the trout.