Submitted by the Assiniboine Watershed Stewardship (AWSA)
If you're a reader that enjoys fishing, you know that Good Spirit Lake is one of the best sport fishing destinations in the entire Assiniboine River Watershed. As the largest lake in the watershed, Good Spirit offers anglers the opportunity to catch game fish such as walleye, pike, perch, and even burbot.
And if you're really in-the-know, then you're aware that one of the best places to catch these fish is at the control outlet structure, in the south-east corner of the lake. Resident fish in the Whitesand River travel up the outlet channel to spawn in the spring, with hundreds of adult fish and thousands of fry congregating to the deep scour hole created by the erosion downstream of the outlet gates. It has made for great fishing over the past few years, similar to "catching fish in a barrel."
However, the downside of this angling hotspot is that as summer progresses, the outlet gates are often closed to maintain lake water levels, which in turn dewaters the channel. As a result, rather than migrating back to the Whitesand River, the fish congregate and become trapped in the washout, and a huge fish kill takes place annually if they are not removed. The Assiniboine Watershed Stewardship Association (AWSA), along with the SK Wildlife Federation (SWF) and the Water Security Agency (WSA) have seine netted out the fish and released them back into the lake since 2009, but it was very apparent that a permanent fix to the problem was needed.
The AWSA submitted a proposal to Environment Canada's EcoACTION funding program to mitigate the problem in 2010, and were approved. However, the extreme flooding the lake experienced that year meant that the control gates had to be left open all winter in order to draw down the lake, making construction work impossible. The AWSA applied to EcoACTION once again in 2012 and were once again successful in their proposal to perform permanent mitigation of the scour hole in the fall of 2013.
The AWSA, along with it partners, the SWF, WSA and the Good Spirit Lake Watershed Association Board undertook the project this past September. First the water in the hole had to be pumped out in order to facilitate seine netting and removal of all the fish prior to construction beginning.
The hole proved to be much deeper than when originally measured back in 2009 (it turned out to be approximately 20ft deep). Over one thousand adult gamefish (walleye, pike, sucker, and burbot), tens of thousands of game fish fingerlings and baitfish were netted and transported into Good Spirit Lake. Once the fish were removed and the hole pumped out, construction was able to begin.
Approximately 2,200 cubic yards of clay were brought in to fill the huge hole that had eroded over the years.
Following the infilling of the hole and contouring of the banks, the entire area was covered with geotextile erosion-control fabric.
The nylon fabric, which comes in rolls 15ft x 300ft, is resistant to water erosion and will ensure future integrity of the construction (the only area of the outlet channel that hadn't eroded over time was where geotextile fabric was originally placed below the culverts). Rock/boulders were then placed on top of the geotextile, followed by pit-run gravel to infill the spaces between the rocks.
The project was a great success, with the area undergoing quite an extensive transformation. It may no longer be the "honey hole" fishing spot it once was, now that the area has been transformed back into the channel it was originally intended to be, but the prevention of thousands of fish from dying annually should be pretty good justification for anglers having to find a new spot to dip their lures.
