...fish are waiting!🐟

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Subject: ...fish are waiting!🐟

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Fishing Trip Offer Exclusively

for FOMR Members

Date: Saturday, July 18, 2020

Approximate length of trip: 3 miles

River: Middle River, Mile marker 5.4 to 2.4

Cost: No charge

(Backup Rain Date: Sunday, July 19, 2020)

Welcome! This is a trip for people who want to FISH! We'll set this up so you can take your time and find all the hidey-holes that the Big One is hanging out in.

This is an organized, unaccompanied fishing trip. The trip is designed to follow Virginia COVID-19 safety guidelines. Now that the state is in Phase 3, guidelines include: "...outdoor recreational sports should maintain ten feet of physical distance between...participants...where practicable." (From Phase Three, Recreational Sports)

1. We are scheduling up to 12 parties to arrive and put-in between 8-10AM.

2. We encourage float parties to consist of persons who have been staying at home with each other for the past recent months.

3. Use of face masks while in the vicinity of persons not in your household is strongly recommended as per the Governor's guidance, especially at the put-in and take-out where it is more likely you could be in groups of people not in your party. We are asking all persons to bring masks and practice social distancing. FOMR staff will be assisting to help people avoid spacing bottlenecks at the put-in.

4. FOMR will secure landowner access permissions, provide driving directions to the take-out, show you where to put-in, mark the take-out for easy recognition, and smile at you from under our masks when you arrive.

5. Paddlers must be able to load, unload and shuttle their own boats and vehicles without assistance.

6. You will need to purchase fishing licenses in advance at https://www.dgif.virginia.gov/licenses/. You can purchase the license online. Minimally an Augusta County resident would need a Resident 5-Day Freshwater Fishing License, though many other packages are available.

There is no fee for this activity, however we will not be providing any insurance. FOMR will NOT be leading the actual trip, you will be paddling on your own. But, we will scout the river in the days before the trip to look for hazards and conditions to make you aware of. This is a relatively easy-going stretch of water under normal conditions and would be good for beginner river paddlers.

Registration deadline is Tuesday, July 14 at midnight. We will keep a waiting list if needed. Sign up HERE!

Above: Henri Bowman competing in the Splash & Dash Canoe & Kayak Race.

On the Passing of Henri

The River has recently lost one of its most passionate devotees in FOMR member Henri Bowman. Her friend, Bill Cranor shares with us this humorous and fond recounting of a paddle trip on Middle River.

My friend, and yours. An eccentric’s eccentric. In this particular incarnation, among many other things, Henri had conceived and staffed a nature camp for her kids—"Camp Hen”— spending not a little time on Middle River. She was a devotee of love, music, nature, kids and riverbank philosophy. She puttered prodigiously...

Volunteer Opportunity: Monitoring Rainfall

Whether you are wanting to paddle for recreation or do some stewardship activity on the River, wouldn’t it be really helpful to get an idea of the water level beyond what you can glean just from what the river gauges and local weather data can tell you? We all know that precipitation levels can vary dramatically within just a few miles.

CoCoRaHS may be the answer! The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS) is a unique, non-profit, community-based network of volunteers of all ages and backgrounds working together to measure and map precipitation (rain, hail and snow). Volunteers record their home-measured precipitation on the CoCoRaHS website. This data then gets plotted on a map showing the precipitation levels of every volunteer data provider across the region.

Would you like to be a precipitation recorder for FOMR? If we can develop a network of FOMR volunteers along the main stem of Middle River as well as other tributaries, there would be two big benefits to our members:

1) We all would be able to see exactly where and how much precipitation fell that might be influencing water levels downstream. We could use that to make decisions about float trips, cleanups, etc... Read MORE.

Source Water Protection Ordinance

"When people turn on their taps in Richmond and Washington, D.C., they are sipping a little bit of Augusta County’s most important natural resource. Having such an abundance of water is a powerful gift and an awesome responsibility." FOMR member Nancy Sorrells, pictured above, expands on this significant concept in her recent webpost for the Alliance for the Shenandoah Valley. She goes on to explain that Augusta County has "one of the most powerful source water protection ordinances in Virginia. The development of the ordinance earned a special award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The ordinance created Source Water Protection Overlay Districts..." To read more about how Augusta County has demonstrated leadership in water protection, click HERE.

Science with Steve

For the past year, FOMR member Steve Rudolph has been engaged in a water temperature project to satisfy his curiosity about what affects the water temperature in Middle River. Here is an update on his work as first described in our newsletter last November.

Steve has now collected a whole year of data along the Middle River at the Verona access just upstream of the Route 11 bridge. He visited every day with some help from his friend, Tom Howell. They measured water temperatures, air temperatures, soil temperatures, humidity, water depth and factored in the UV index which is a measurement of ultraviolet radiation. What were some of the final general findings from Steve’s study?

“I have learned that a flooded river water temperature stays between 50 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit no matter what time of year. And also a flooded river causes the humidity to be 7-12 % above what is observed elsewhere.

I have found that the water temperature is mostly affected by the UV index. Flooding (as well as a cold overnight temperature) will cause the water’s high temperature for the next day to be lower.” Steve's plotted water temperatures are shown in the graph above. Thanks, Steve!

Tom Shapcott

Pictured above is FOMR's E. coli monitoring chairperson, Dr. Tom Shapcott. When not counting E. coli cultures, he is either doctoring or earning advanced awards through the Department of Wildlife Resources Angler Recognition Program. (The Department of Wildlife Resources is formerly named the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.) Tom's trophy fish include Smallmouth Bass, Brook Trout, Brown Trout, Striped Bass and Yellow Perch citations, plus two recently added Largemouth Bass citations. (His recent Smallmouth catch pictured above was only a "one-hander.")

E. coli Monitoring Report

Tom Shapcott compiles and posts the monthly E. coli monitoring report on our website. You can see the June report HERE.

Wild Virginia Online Book Club

Wild Virginia is hosting an online book club that will discuss the book Nature's Best Hope by Douglas W. Tallamy on Monday, July 13 from 7-8:30 pm.

Wild Virginia writes: "In Nature's Best Hope, Tallamy argues that 'Restoring viable habitat within the human-dominated landscapes that separate habitat fragments... is the single most effective thing we can do to stop the steady drain of species from our local ecosystems.' He proposes that the replacement of even half of our lawns with native plants would effectively create a twenty million acre national park that could be named Homegrown National Park."

Join Wild Virginia for a discussion of how each of us can make a difference while staying close to home. A link to join the online conversation will be sent to registrants before the event. You are welcome to join even if you don't have an opportunity to read the book in advance.

FOMR is a Paddle America Club member

and our recreational river activities are conducted in partnership with the American Canoe Association.

Read more about Friends of the Middle River at our website HERE.

And follow us on Facebook!
P.O. Box 131, Verona VA 24482

540-609-8267

FOMR is a 501(c)(3) organization.

Friends of the Middle River, PO Box 131, Verona, Virginia 24482, United States

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Subject: ...fish are waiting!🐟