Chiotti said most of the dead trout he saw were fingerlings hatched from this year's spring spawning run. Significant numbers of one- and two-year-old trout also floated lifelessly in the eddies.

"I'd say we completely lost two year-classes of trout, anyway," he said. "It's the worst fish kill I've seen in my 23 years with the department."

After the accident, the DEC put up posters along the Inlet, advising anglers not to fish.

The fuel that settled to the bottom of the creek will be dissipated by the next gully-washer or snowmelt, and adult rainbow trout will spawn in the stream as usual in the spring, Chiotti predicted.

"The impact will be most noticeable three or four years from now," said Chiotti. "That's when all those small rainbows that were killed would be large adults."

He said state hatcheries can make up for some, but not all, of the fish that were lost in the spill.

Great Lakes Braces for El Nino

Hatchery biologist started taking eggs the first week of October, but then things really slowed down, said fisheries expert Andy Gruelich. He didn't call off the operation until last week, after heavy rains and rising water levels had nudged one last school of chinooks onto the hatchery grounds.

This year males seemed to dominate in the river , with the number of females seemed to be down. We handled four times as many males as females by the time we got all the eggs we needed." said Gruelich.

A significant proportion of the males were 3- to 6-pound jacks. Jacks are sexually precocious male salmon which mature at age 1½, a year or two earlier than most of their kind.

A record run of jacks were reported at the hatchery, with almost 3,000 of them coming up river.

And that's great news for 98 anglers! Generally, a salmon stocking that produces a bumper crop of jacks can also be counted on to yield a bountiful harvest of 20-pound 2-year-olds and 30-pound 3-year-olds.

Lake Ontario's coho salmon fishery appears to be on the upswing, too, based on hatchery returns.

Ruffe Impacting Fish Communities