It’s getting to be that time of year.
For me, my experience on one of Idaho’s Central Mountains rivers yesterday caused me to give some thought to an ethical question - under what circumstances should you NOT fish ?? Specifically, at what point do the flows and temperature of the water indicate that even the best hooking, fighting, and catch and release techniques will likely result in a high mortality rate for fish caught ??
Three years ago, it was not uncommon to have a 30 or 40 fish day on this little river, with lots of rainbows in the 13-15" range topping out, to my experience, at 17". On one occasion, I fished this little river one afternoon and evening and caught over 50 fish. The next morning, I fished some different water on the same river and caught another 50 plus fish.
Two years ago, we had a terrible long, hot, and dry summer here in SE Idaho. The small creeks and rivers that I like to fish were running very low, and warm. I gave up fishing completely from early July through mid September because I thought it was unethical to add stress to the stress the fishies were already experiencing 24 /7 because of the conditions of their environment.
Last year I only fished this river one time and thought I had an off day, catching very few fish. Yesterday, I caught about 18 trouts, and considered it a very slow day. It got me to thinking - did that long, hot, dry summer two years ago decimate this fishery ?? I think the answer is “yes”. The bull trout I caught yesterday were fewer and larger than the ones I caught three and more years ago. The rainbow trout were fewer and generally smaller than the ones I used to catch here. That tells me that the bull trout were occupying the larger holes higher up in the system and probably crowding out the smaller bulls and bows. And that the conditions further down the system just about wiped out the rainbow population, hitting the larger and older bows harder than the little ones.
Another fact suggests that the above is an accurate assessment of what happened on that little river. Idaho Fish and Game stocked this river with just over 500 triploid kamloops trout last summer. That is the first time this river has been stocked in 24 years. Looks to me like Fish and Game realized how serious the situation was, and tried to supplement the fishing there with the non-reproducing triploid kamloops, which should grow faster and larger, while the wild rainbow population comes back on its own.
That’s a long story to get back to the question of ethics, and really, the question goes primarily to wild trout fisheries, and particularly wild and native trout fisheries.
Consider this - hooking mortality for trout generally results from four major factors, alone or in combination. First is the condition of the fishery. High water temps over a sustained period of time so stress the fish that they have little chance of surviving being hooked. Second is the depth of hooking. Deeply hooked fish are much more likely to die than are lightly hooked fish. Third, the longer the fish is fought, or played, the more likely it is to die. Fourth, the way the fish is handled and released plays a big role in the likelihood of a fish surviving being landed and released.
So if the water temps get up there, fishing at all becomes an ethical question, because no matter how well you do at hooking, landing a fish quickly, and releasing it properly, there is a real prospect, likely in range of probability, that the fish will die. In a stocked “put and take” fishery maybe that is not such a big thing. In a wild trout or wild and native trout fishery it is a HUGE thing.
Montana, and maybe some other states with which I am not familiar, does a decent job of tending to its wild trout fisheries. It closes water to fishing when the water conditions get bad. But it might not go far enough, since it does allow fishing on some effected fisheries from early morning until noon on the basis that the water had cooled off enough to relieve the stress on the fishes. But the decision to fish when the water conditions have been poor for any length of time shouldn’t be left to the state - it should be an ethical decision made by each individual who goes out to the water with a rod in hand.
The future of our wild and wild and native fisheries is in our hands. Let’s do right by the trouts that don’t live in ugly places.
John
