To read a fish stocking report, start with the size column, not the date. Washington and Utah both publish free per-event stocking tables, and both answer “was a lake stocked” in one glance. Neither answers “is there anything catchable in there” unless you read the size field, and the two states express size completely differently. This site builds every lake page from these same reports, so the columns below are the ones behind the numbers here too.
Washington: WDFW catchable trout plant reports
WDFW’s trout plant report is a single table with seven columns: Lake, Stock date, Species, Number, Fish per pound, Hatchery and Notes. Two things about it catch people out.
First, its scope. WDFW states the report covers “catchable trout (fish three per pound or larger, including broodstock)”. Fry and fingerling plants, warmwater species and the forward-looking annual stocking plan are all on separate WDFW pages. Nothing in this report, and so nothing in Washington’s data on this site, is smaller than about 9 inches.
Second, there is no length column. WDFW publishes fish per pound instead, and a separate conversion table that maps it to a length: 3.0 fish per pound is about 9 inches, 2.0 is about 11 inches, 1.0 is about 13 inches, and 0.1 fish per pound (roughly 10 pound broodstock) is, in WDFW’s wording, “up to approximately 30 inches”. This site converts using that table, which is why a Washington plant here shows inches when the agency’s own page shows a decimal. Past years live in a per-year archive going back to 2015, with 2014 available as a PDF. See the Washington hub for the lakes built from this report.
Utah: the DWR fish stocking app
Utah’s Division of Wildlife Resources runs a stocking lookup with six columns: Water Name, County, Species, Quantity, Average Length and Date Stocked. Utah publishes the length directly, in inches, on every row, and covers plants at every size rather than catchables only. That is why every fry and fingerling example on this site is a Utah one. See the Utah hub for the full picture built from this data.
The columns that matter most
- Date: when the fish went in, not when the report was published.
- Quantity: how many fish, which by itself says nothing about size. A 2.4 million fish plant is fry.
- Size: Utah’s average length, or Washington’s fish per pound run through the conversion table. This is the field that separates a catchable plant from a multi-year investment.
- Species: usually precise, but not always. Utah uses an
ALL TROUTlabel on a small number of rows where the agency did not break the plant out by species, so a lake can show a trout plant whose actual species mix is not in the record.
What this site adds
A single report row is a snapshot. This site keeps every plant per lake, so you can read restocking frequency and trend instead of the latest row. Check the stocked this week feed for the freshest Washington plants, the Utah equivalent for Utah, and a lake’s own page for its complete history.