Quote:
Originally Posted by Bigbadblair
Hmm -Yeti that's not what I took away from the public information session..
40 years of inaction have led us to this point where we have collapsed populations. Rainbow trout are going to be listed as endangered. ENDANGERED... that's the same listing as Black Rhinos and panda's.. We can do better.
The approach that they presented was based on science, not feelings. I don't want to be complicit in the loss of native trout because I wasn't willing to give up 5 years of fun in a couple places..
Habitat is an issue- no question, however I respectfully disagree with your opinion on fishing closures.
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Maybe Athabasca rainbows... You can write a letter to fisheries reminding them that they were the ones that allowed the industry, habitat destruction and stocked invasive species like brook trout etc that is causing the real problems these fish are facing...
Temporary angling closures are not a recovery method. They have no long term beneficial impact unless a certain waterbody was just decimated due to some uncommon event(which none of these waterbodies have had btw, except maybe the Clearwater from flooding).
Fixing the habitat issues needs to be fisheries number one goal. Not inflating test results by temporary angling bans... With these bans fisheries now has no baseline to compare their results with. Their results from the work over the past couple years is void because there will have been too many changes made over the next 5 years to know what is actually improving these waterbodies. They will literally have no idea if these fisheries are able to again support fishing pressure and will be forced to open them up and then retest again years down the road...
I don't think anyone here disagrees with trying to improve these waterbodies. What people disagree with is the method in doing so. Especially when that method will create a number of other issues namely substantially increasing the fishing pressure on the few remaining rivers(especially bull trout rivers). For every fish these bios will save with these angling closures they just guaranteed the death of an extra fish in another river system... Not hard to see that these closures will lead to nothing but more closures, some of which will likely become permanent...
I am glad I am not a river fisherman otherwise this stuff would frustrate me even more then it does. If you are a river fisherman you need to realize what is likely going to come out of this situation because it almost guaranteed isn't going to be what you are expecting or hoping for.
It is no different then the walleye. Lets just recover the walleye lakes and then we can open the limits back up. Yeah ok, decades later still no open limits on most of these lakes... Good luck if you think the same thing isn't going to happen here...