Slough Creek Conservation Project
On Saturday September 19, 18 members of the club met at
the concession building at Sedgwick County Park to clean trash from the
waterway and to rebuild the dam structures that form pools to hold trout
during the regular trout season. Many bags of trash was removed from the
creek area. Sand bags were provided to the club by the cities west yard and
several of the members present went to work filling about 200 bags and
placing them along with the old concrete billets that were gathered from the
bottom of the creek. They were scattered there during the heavy water flows
encountered during the year. In four hours we rebuilt 4 dams and replaced
one wing dam. Water is now flow-ing through each dam in one place with a
strong current which will dig a large channel in the sand down stream from
the dam. This should give the fish some deep water to hide in. I look at the
creek now and feel a great deal of pride because this asset that we have now
is much improved com-pared to what we had about 15 years ago when we first
started working on the creek. Ken McCloskey recognized the potential of the
creek and the first year we built dams out of tree limbs and sand bags and
dug channels through cat-tails with hand shovels. That was before Ken
convinced the city to go through with a big back hoe and drag line to dig
the main channel. If it wasn't for Ken's vision and perseverance we would
not have the fine trout fishery that we have now. After every one went home
on Saturday I took a quite walk along the full length of the creek to
inspect what we accomplished and counted a total of 6 bass some up to 8
inches, 8 bluegill, and 4 carp about 16 inches. I am sure that there are
more in there but they were just staying out of sight. I saw some places
that still need some work and I will organize another work party to get that
done before the water gets to cold. Thank you to all who helped and I look
forward to seeing some others help in the future.
Neal Hall Conservation
Director