SUNDERLAND, Vt. (AP) – Trout anglers from all over the world float flies in the eddies and pools of the Batten Kill, trying to land its famously elusive brook and brown trout.

These days, it’s harder than ever: A magnet for fly fishing purists, the stream-fed river has seen its fish populations decline. Still, when the state Department of Fish and Wildlife suggested stocking the Vermont section of the 30-mile river with 1,000 sterile rainbow trout, some saw it as sacrliege.

Now, the Batten Kill is engaged in a struggle for its soul.

To hardcore fly fishermen, the idea of stocking it with rainbow trout is like allowing Major League Baseball players to use aluminum bats. They’re happy to release what they catch. More casual anglers, on the other hand, want more more fish in the river – and the right to keep what they catch.

“It’s unlike any other river in Vermont,” said Eric Rickstad, the president of the local chapter of Trout Unlimited, floating a fly one recent afternoon. “It’s deep. It looks slow, but it’s pretty powerful, actually. And it’s been known for great fishing, difficult fishing, even when the populations were way up.”

It’s not the same Batten Kill it once was.

“It’s evolved into a class thing,” said Arlington Town Clerk Birdie Wyman, who has lived her whole life on the Batten Kill but gave up fishing in paart because there were too many other people using the river. “You never see a kid with a can of worms fishing any more,” Wyman said. “My grandchildren have no concept of how much fun it used to be to fish that river.”

Last month, The Orvis Co., a Manchester-based fly fishing outfitter founded in the 1850s because of Batten Kill trout, threatened to withdraw a $100,000 grant to help restore the river if the state follows through with the proposal.

Orvis CEO Leigh “Perk” Perkins equates fishing the Batten Kill to skiing an expert ski trail. Going for stocked fish, he says, is like skiing a beginner trail.

“To catch trout on the Batten Kill, you really need to get to know the river,” Perkins said. “You become successful on the Batten Kill when you get to know its personality.”

Vermont Fish and Wildlife Commissioner Wayne LaRoche is expected to decide sometime early next year whether to go ahead with the stocking plan, which is part of a broader plan to restore habitat on the river.

The goal of the stocking is to put some fish in the river that people can catch while the wild and native populations rebound on their own.

State officials know that no matter what they decide, people will be upset.

“We’re trying to look at multiple value systems,” said state fisheries director Eric Palmer. “We don’t tend to take a side of only wild fish or only stocked fish. What can we do to meet the needs of multiple groups?”

Opponents of stocking say that even though the 10-12 inch rainbows would be sterile ones – rendered so by changing the water temperature they’re raised in – and couldn’t reproduce, they would compete with the wild trout and eventually push them out. The water that eventually drains into the Batten Kill gets its start high in the Green Mountains, trickling south through and into New York, where it empties into the Hudson River.

The area first started attracting down-country anglers in the first half of the 19th century, when tourists from New York or Philadelphia traveled to Manchester. Over the generations, the fish remained and the mystique gradually grew up and the Batten Kill helped develop fly fishing. Now, books have been written about fishing the Batten Kill. The American Fly Fishing Museum is located in Manchester. And local inns cater to fly fishermen who are drawn to the Batten Kill.

“One of the reasons we came up here and bought the inn here was because it was on the Batten Kill,” said Alan Edmunds, who owns the Batten Kill Bed and Breakfast in Sunderland, which has a practice pond and trails that lead to the river.

“There are a lot of easier trout streams to fish, and there are a lot of places you can go to catch stocked trout,” said Edmunds. “In this stream, if you catch fish out of there, it’s kind of a gold medal.”

The hype is there, and, until a decade or so ago, so were the fish.

“Some people I think would say this image of the Batten Kill is just about marketing,” said Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife Biologist Ken Cox. “That carries some weight, but the river itself has to prove all the claims. You can’t just dupe the public for 200 years.”

Over the years, sections of the river have been straightened, trees cut from its sides and farm fields laid up to its banks.

The loss of trees was key. In addition to keeping the river shaded and its waters cool, trees provided refuge for intermediate-sized trout once they fell into the river.

“Because the river had so many other characteristics going for it, it was able to weather a lot of this damage that was being done to it,” Cox said. “When you are depending on a wild river to sustain itself, (It’s hard) In the mid 1990s the whole landscape reached a tipping point. It hit a point where it just couldn’t hold up.”

In 2000, the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife imposed a catch and release requirement on the most heavily fished stretch of the Batten Kill. The lack of fishing pressure means there are more big fish in the river, but the numbers haven’t increased, Cox said.

Now, there are so few fish they’re almost impossible for the casual angler to catch, said Wyman. She thinks the debate about wild trout is overblown.

“When it was touted as the best stream in the world was in the ’60s and ’70s, when they stocked the devil out of it,” Wyman said. “Over in New York state, they stock it. They put thousands in over there. From my house, it’s two miles (downstream to New York). So much for wild trout.”

But Rickstad said it’s not about class, it’s about science.

“It’s about patience versus impatience, about putting our wants as anglers on the back burner to take care of the resource,” he said. “I love to catch fish and I love to catch a lot of them, but not at the expense of the river.”