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Me and a buddy took a drive this morning up to a high mountain lake that just barely became accessible. It is a pretty small lake that gets stocked every year as the winter kill is quite high due to its small size. To our surprise the lake had quite a few fish that carried over and we caught a nice limit of rainbows. My buddy wanted them for the smoker, but he said when he cleaned them their organs were green and yellow and the inside of their bellies were stained a little bit. We have never seen this before so my question is: Could this be from a hard long winter? The fish seemed to be in pretty decent shape with a few on the skinny side here and there.
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Probably from eating algae. I've had rainbows from strike full of Russian olives and there stomachs were really green. Could of been from the bugs they were eating also.
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how did thier skin look? were they bright and vibrant or were they looking more like a kokanee? right at the end of the spawn those rainbows are in pretty bad shape, meat is real mushy like. u said this lake has just become acsessable, that due to snow finaly being gone? shouldnt be to much alage in water yet. thats interesting i hope someone posts that knows more about this, those high mountain lakes allways gaurantee you some tasty eating...
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We put a call in to F&G and they said to not eat the fish. They are going to send someone up and inspect the lake and fish. The fish looked relatively healthy on the outside with some signs of post-spawn issues. We were only keeping the better looking fish. I'll update when we get some more information/results from F&G.
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