Re: NANFA-- paint rock?

Bruce Stallsmith (fundulus_at_hotmail.com)
Mon, 26 Nov 2001 11:20:20 -0500

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>did you fellas get wet? cold? washed downstream? is bruce ok?
>we had quite a rain this weekend... fri and sat. the creek behind the house
>was a raging. even my pool filled up a bit. sunday we found salamanders and
>a
>frog in it. not ready to fill yet so i will have to drain it again. rigging
>a
>extended, filtered meshed, drain pipe in the deep end so it will not get
>mucked.
>casper
Yeah, Steven and I did the crazy thing and went collecting during a tornado
warning (not watch, warning!). Parts of north Alabama were blown up fairly
badly, like the town of Haleyville in Winston County (near the Sipsey) had
its main street ripped up in about 20 seconds flat. This was happening by
the time Steven and I were way up the Paint Rock River valley just south of
the TN line, where it merely rained with some thunder. But it's out of cell
phone range (of course!) and my wife was convinced that we were in the lower
Paint Rock which had tornadic activity... I realize that we need satellite
phones for collecting in this region if there's any need for outside
communication.

We actually had a good collecting day. I have 5 northern studfish to send to
Jay, all young adults. Just working a riffle with a net I caught 6 different
species of darter--greenside, rainbow, Tennessee snubnose, black (snubnose),
stripetail and fantail. We hardly used the seine so we didn't catch any of
the Percina species in the deeper pool. Steven caught a beautiful warmouth
sunfish that we released, I'd have taken a picture but it was raining too
hard at that point. And Steven netted several mountain shiners, _Lythrurus
lirus_, which he kept (I did too, now that I think about it...). I also
snagged a few more stonerollers.

I don't recommend tornado collecting but it worked for us. Air temp was
about 60 F so it was not difficult being in the water, but water temp was
definitely lower than it was last June (big surprise!). So we survived,
hooray!

--Bruce Stallsmith
Tornado Alley, Huntsville, AL, US of A

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