Fishing 'new' waters a special experience
There’s something special about fishing “new” water, as in having never fished it before.
It’s extra gratifying when you have some success, particularly on a waterway that had experienced years of decimation from industrial pollutants and acid mine drainage.
So it was for my friend Tom Ference and I last weekend. As the fog stubbornly lifted from the valley of the Kiskiminetas River, I watched Tom set the hook on a feisty smallmouth bass that had eaten the three-inch white grub he’d been fishing on a leadhead jig.
Moments later, I did the same, this time on one a foot or so long that had inhaled a soft jerkbait.
For several years the Kiski had provided good fishing for a variety of species. Clean up efforts directed at both the Kiski proper, and feeding waters such as the Conemaugh, have improved water quality markedly.
As medium-sized rivers go, the Kiski is relatively short. It’s only a 27-mile run from where the Conemaugh River and Loyalhanna Creek unite in Saltsburg to form the Kiskiminetas, to where it merges with the Allegheny just north of Freeport. Along the way towns like Avonmore, Vandergrift, Apollo and Leechburg crowd its banks, places with an industrial/steel-making heritage, much of which is now history.
It’s probably been over 30 years since my friend Dave Keith and I regularly caught scores of walleyes and sauger from the mouth of the Kiski, just below Lock and Dam 5. This often happened during periods of higher flows, when pollutants would have been diluted a great deal.
But there was no doubt the fish where in the flow coming out of the Kiski, rather than that of the Allegheny. Interestingly, we also caught plenty of saugeyes in this area, not just from the junction pool, but from the Allegheny as well.
From the tailrace area of the dam, the mouth of Buffalo Creek and other pools, saugeyes showed up with regularity, along with plenty of walleye and sauger. Their presence could only be explained as being from stockings in Loyalhanna Dam, of which these fish must have been escapees. So even back then water quality was good enough in the Kiski for these fish to make the 30 mile-plus journey from Loyalhanna Lake to the Allegheny.
During the three hours or so that Tom and I fished the Kiski. we landed a dozen smallmouth bass and lost several others. Most of the fish were small – eight to 10 inches – but a couple were over a foot in length. Tom, who has wade-fished parts of the Kiski the past few years, has taken plenty of fish in the 15-inch range. Just before we finished up our morning, he had a walleye in the 20-inch range hooked.
The water level at the USGS Vandergrift gauge was 3.4 during our float. Much less than that and it would have difficult to float a canoe or kayak through some of the riffles. This flow rate is a bit lower than average for this time of year. 4 to 4.5 feet would seem ideal to me for both floating and fishing, at least for the part of the river we were on.
Canoe/kayak access on the Kiski can be found at the River’s Edge Park in Saltsburg, on the Westmoreland bank of the river downriver of Avonmore, and at the Roaring Run Access upriver of Apollo.
From the mouth of the Kiski, it’s about a one mile float down to Buffalo Creek, under the Route 356 bridge. The Fish and Boat Commission has an access area just up Buffalo Creek.
Remember, non-powered boats must be registered, or have a launch permit from the Fish and Boat Commission, to use PFBC access areas.
Jeff Knapp is an outdoors columnist for the Butler Eagle
