1972: The Survey That Found This Water Richest

July–August 1972; Michigan DNR Technical Report 75-9, October 1975

In the summer of 1972 the Michigan Department of Natural Resources surveyed the whole St. Joseph River, headwaters to mouth, at minimum flow — fifty-two mainstem stations, forty-four in Michigan and eight in Indiana, every one of them electrofished, thirty-six netted as well — and the richest water on the river, by its own tables, was Mishawaka's. The survey's Mishawaka stations were No. 37 at Vistula Road and No. 38, the Mishawaka Impoundment (T37N, R3E, Sec. 12), in the reach its report calls Section I-2, "Below Elkhart Dam to Mishawaka Dam"; below the downtown dam, Station No. 39 at Memorial Park (T37N, R3E, Sec. 17) opened Section I-3, "Below Mishawaka Dam to Bertrand," a mile below the Mishawaka wastewater treatment plant. The headline is the report's own: "The highest number of game fish (186) and also the highest number of total fish (300) for the entire survey was collected at Mishawaka Impoundment (Station #38). Crappies were the most abundant game fish" — twenty-four black crappies and 106 white crappies, though "only 13 of the combined total were over 7 inches in length," and below them thirty-eight bullheads of eight to twelve inches as the predominant nongame fish. The report's summary page gives the same station the survey's game-fish record at 188 — the two figures stand in the report as printed, the summary's and the section narrative's, and both are carried here — and credits a Mishawaka Impoundment station with the survey's heaviest nongame catch by weight, 185.5 pounds. The section table for I-2 fills in the impoundment's character: white crappie 139 and black crappie 80 in the combined section catch, pumpkinseed 65, redhorse 106, carp 62 with a weighed sample of 163 pounds — a warm, slow, crappie-and-carp impoundment fauna, exactly what a dammed reach holds. Below the dam the river ran thinner: at Memorial Park, 109 of 134 fish collected were game fish "but only 8 were of catchable size." The water itself read clean at this reach by the survey's instruments — dissolved oxygen 8.0 parts per million at both Mishawaka stations, water 67–68 degrees — against the survey's lowest reading, 4.5 ppm, found below the South Bend wastewater treatment plant downstream. And the report's shore notes fix the impoundment in its summer of 1972 in one line: "Swimming beaches, diving docks and skiing ramps were present on the impoundment," its banks "residential and wooded." The survey's river-wide totals — 4,782 fish, 2,694 of them game fish, black crappie and bluegill the leading game species, carp and redhorse the leading nongame — stand in the report; what this section claims from it is the station record: on the only whole-river scientific survey of the twentieth century, the Mishawaka Impoundment out-fished every other station on the St. Joseph.

Principal sources

1. Raymond Shepherd, "Inventory of Fish and Evaluation of Water Quality During Minimum Flow Period in the St. Joseph River," Michigan Department of Natural Resources, Fisheries Division, Technical Report No. 75-9 (October 1975) — read whole: the summary, the station list, the Section I-2 and I-3 tables and narratives.