“Never thought I’d live to see the day in my lifetime that you’d be able to fish in that creek,” said Jay Evans of the Nanty Glo Recreation Board.

 

When Evans was a kid, the creek in Nanty Glo was orange from sulfur and full of trash. 

 

About 20 years ago, the locals started cleaning it up.  Now, it’s clean enough to stock with trout. 

 

“I said [to a friend], ‘You know, we’re stocking the creek’,” Evans said. “He said, ‘Stocking it with what?’ and I said ‘Trout.’ He said, ‘There’s no way’ and I said ‘Yeah.'”

 

The South Branch Fishing Club stocked the creek with trout for the first time last year. 

 

“I think two of the stockings was about 200 fish and the other two were about 300 fish. So we’re lookin’ at about a thousand fish,” Evans said.

 

“We could only imagine that there would be actual fish living in the stream and to see them thrive and grow and carry over was great,” Ernest Sekerak said.  Sekerak took his kids fishing on the first day of trout season last year.

 

“Last year there was a pretty nice crowd on the first day and there’s a lot of kids and that was our primary focus,” Evans said. “We want to produce a facility where kids would be able to catch fish and thus want to keep fishing.”

 

“We had a blast,” Sekerak said.  Sekerak owns X-Cel Therapy in town and his children attend school in Nanty Glo. He said it’s nice to have something to do in town. “My son caught numerous trout and the laughs and things that we shared were priceless.”

 

Last year, the fishing club raised $2,500 just by selling pins.  They hope to raise even more this year. 

 

“If there’s enough interest and we start attracting people from outside,” Evans said, “hopefully the people that come to fish – if they come from out of town – they’re gonna stop at one of the local restaurants.”

 

Evans said fishing is a dying hobby, so it’s nice to see kids down by the creek. 

 

“Two little boys come up and ‘Hey mister, catch any fish?’,” Evans said. “I said ‘Yeah I did. I caught two’ and they said ‘We caught two there yesterday!’ They were so excited. So that really made it rewarding that the kids are enjoying it.”

 

Eventually, they hope to stock the whole creek from Route 22 to Twin Rocks.