Fly Fishing, The Internet, and SpotBurning

Ill bite.

Ok dave true enough.

Did the added pressure ruin those two trout streams?

If so, how?

All the fish get kept? Doubtful hard to catch the 1" fish.

Is it just now crowded? If so and you believe that ruined it fine i can live with that but some others may not agree.

After all special people like special regs and those are crowded.


To my point everyone defibes that criteria different.
Now i know you dont Dave but some feel the need to chastise in order to make others conform to their defi ition.

Pretty stupid to do and more stupid to give in.

In the end, what really makes me laugh is the guy who sees mis handling and claims the fish is dead a now blasts that guy for the bext hour. Or those that see a stream mentioned and assume tomorrow 100 anglers will decend upon the banks.
For all they know that mishandled fish is swimming past tumble weeds today.

Pretty commical.

 
Little advice to anyone.
Pay attention.
When a creek gets burnt and the regulars blow up. Its a good creek.
After the regulars throw their fit and the spot burning crowd leaves, wait a year or two. The fishing will return and the regulars assumed its ruined and do not.
:lol:

Plus side is you can throw a fit over nothing if it gets burned after that apparently
 
salvelinusfontinalis wrote:
Ill bite.

Ok dave true enough.

Did the added pressure ruin those two trout streams?
[color=990000]
Absolutely! [/color]

If so, how?

[color=990033]No fish left there anymore. Nothing to see here. [/color] ;-)

All the fish get kept? Doubtful hard to catch the 1" fish.

Is it just now crowded? If so and you believe that ruined it fine i can live with that but some others may not agree.

After all special people like special regs and those are crowded.


To my point everyone defibes that criteria different.
Now i know you dont Dave but some feel the need to chastise in order to make others conform to their defi ition.

Pretty stupid to do and more stupid to give in.

In the end, what really makes me laugh is the guy who sees mis handling and claims the fish is dead a now blasts that guy for the bext hour. Or those that see a stream mentioned and assume tomorrow 100 anglers will decend upon the banks.
For all they know that mishandled fish is swimming past tumble weeds today.

Pretty commical.
Click to expand...

OK, I decided to stop commenting above because I generally agree with you on these subjects, and you know it. You are doing fine.

The stream I was talking about is somewhat of an exception. I know someone who lives there and he has had some rather unpleasant experiences from anglers. How would you feel if you came home and your wife told you that someone took a shart in your backyard, and then flipped her off when she tapped on the window? There were others, but that was likely the worst.

The biggest point here and it has been stated by others. We all need to be respectful of the property owners.

There are A-holes everywhere, and the more people there are the greater the chance at least one is an #censor#.
 
Totally spot on but i left to wonder, why does this debate rage on when its a stream on 100 percent publuc land?
*shrugs*
 
One more thing Sal,

I agree with you that any effects of a typical spot burn are almost always short lived. But the example that I provided is not a typical spot burn. It's more like a permanent advertisement that it is the best in a large area, so come fish me. The stream was changed over the years to be in essence, a special regs stream without the special regs.

I've even heard people (on here) say there are lots of small fish, but few over 8 inches. Care to take a guess why?
 
My first guess would be available food.
My second is habitat.
My third is enviromental factors.

My last is regs and pressure.

Either way to my point in the last post i made, the reason the spot burning debate about streams on publicland continues is :

Its for miserable people made to feel better by taking something soneone loved and wanted share and making them feel miserable about it.

This is the one way the internet has been bad for the sport.
 
salvelinusfontinalis wrote:
...

Either way to my point in the last post i made, the reason the spot burning debate about streams on publicland continues is :

Its for miserable people made to feel better by taking something soneone loved and wanted share and making them feel miserable about it.

This is the one way the internet has been bad for the sport.
Click to expand...

Well, it’s bad, but not just for the sport.

See my quote about A-holes and add anonymity. It's a great enabler.

I try not to say anything that I wouldn’t say in person.
 
salvelinusfontinalis wrote:
Totally spot on but i left to wonder, why does this debate rage on when its a stream on 100 percent publuc land?
*shrugs*
Click to expand...

Beats me, and in a way we were talking apples to oranges.

Sorry for my tangent.
 
No worries and i was doing the same.

Now can i fish and post pictures of your pond?:lol:
 
I don't think that the internet has necessarily increased pressure on all that many streams but like others have said, it probably has helped to spread more people out. Yes, maybe that little honey hole of a stream isn't only fished by you anymore when in fact, it probably never was. Also, I'm lazy. I'm not willing to drive far to fish..someone can tell me that the Delaware is the best trout fishing in the Eastern u.s., great, enjoy it, I'll probably stay within 15 minutes of my house and fish for whatever is around.

Locals always know about all of the good parts of a stream. From what I can tell and, i I know many streams like this, the locals generally aren't giving up this information. The streams which have gotten more crowded for sure are the big named ones. Penns, Spring, Fishing, Little J, Delaware, etc. And there is a bonus there. The more people that travel to fish these places is what keep our useful little shops that will provide us with knowledge in business like Flyfisher's, The Feathered Hook, Penns Creek Angler, etc.
 
Objective analysis…As a small stream angler I was racking my brain trying to think of the number of times I’ve even seen another angler on the same small stream, on the same day as me. On STW’s in April or early May, yeah it happens reasonably frequently. But that’s to be expected, and I don’t think internet exposure is the source of those crowds. Those same streams are empty by Memorial Day, or whenever the weather turns consistently warm, whichever is first that year. Even in April or May on STW’s, there’s more times where I don’t run into anyone else than when I do.

On non-stocked small streams, or any small stream from after Memorial Day until the following year’s Opening Day for that matter, I hardly ever run into anyone. There’s two fairly well known (for small, non-stocked streams anyway) Poconos streams that I’ve regularly encountered other anglers on. They’ve both been discussed on here, and I’m sure many members know which streams they are, or could narrow down the field pretty close. If I plan to go to one of those (only one of them actually fishes well IMO), I make sure I’m there at dawn, or before, and the first guy there. There’s a reasonably well known, remote, NC PA stream that I often encounter other anglers on, but it’s a fairly good sized watershed once you’re into it, and there’s room for a few guys to spread out and have plenty of stream mileage to fish and not be in each other’s way.

Other than early season on STW’s, or those 3 streams mentioned above, I can count the number of times I’ve run into someone else on a small stream on one hand probably. So if the internet is in fact exposing these types of streams, its impact is minimal IMO, at least when considering the number of streams it has affected. Has it affected those three? Maybe, I don't know for sure. Across the board in general though I’m just not seeing the evidence of it in terms of angler usage on those kinds of streams. Every person I’ve run into was C&R fishing also. If locals are freezer filling, they know the stream and the fish are there…The internet didn’t change that.

I yield to the others on the impact on larger streams. I don’t fish them much, so I don’t have the historic baseline to tell of the change over time (if any). I’ve never gone to a big stream however, and been unable to find locations to fish though because of crowds. This includes Penns with the Drakes. It was a zoo, yeah, but it’s a big stream and the manner in which it is fished means it can accommodate more anglers than a small stream. On a big stream you cover water very slowly. It may take you an hour, or more, to work through a pool or run that’s a couple hundred yards long. On a small stream you can cover a half mile or more of water in an hour.
 
Just curious about this... by the time I started fly-fishing many people were using the internet and state lists were available online... but in the early to mid 1980s did many people have copies of the state natural reproduction list before the internet was widely used? Seems like a long list to distribute in paper?

Landis and those lists may have spread fishermen out a bit.

 
k-bob wrote:
Just curious about this... by the time I started fly-fishing many people were using the internet and state lists were available online... but in the early to mid 1980s did many people have copies of the state natural reproduction list before the internet was widely used? Seems like a long list to distribute in paper?

Landis and those lists may have spread fishermen out a bit.
Click to expand...

In the 80's did the state even track and/or keep data on such things? Wouldn't surprise me if they didn't..there were places where we knew wild trout were and weren't as a whole, but someone knew they were in most places because some youngster gets bored and fishes the stream beside his house and is surprised at what he finds, etc. I'm not sure if I can say when the state started keeping those records.
 
k-bob wrote:
Just curious about this... by the time I started fly-fishing many people were using the internet and state lists were available online... but in the early to mid 1980s did many people have copies of the state natural reproduction list before the internet was widely used? Seems like a long list to distribute in paper?

Landis and those lists may have spread fishermen out a bit.
Click to expand...

Funny you asked that.

I was going to respond with ... I cannot confirm or deny that. ;-)

But what the hell.

I had scanned copies of lists of streams with natural reproduction for the three counties I used to fish most frequently. I don't know when the lists were started, but I got those copies probably in the mid 90s.

What's strange is I got them from someone who lives in Ohio.

So yea, there was info available for people smart enough to ask and smart enough to know who to ask. I wasn't that smart, but smart enough to be friends with someone who was.

But now that I think about it, we became friends through this site. so that's another plus.

Going further back to where the internet was in it's infancy ... when I still lived in PA... One of my fishing buddies was a deputy fish cop. I didn't need no stinkin internet. ;-)
 
I believe I read that the wilderness trout stream list has existed since 1969... that's a shorter list so maybe people had that.

Now that the long natural reproduction list is featured on the agency's website, I'm sure more people must use it vs the 80s.

(Again this assumes there was a nat repro list in the 80s, probably for envtl regs).

 
Saw this today while i Was working and it made me sad but also made me think of this thread.

Moosic along the Lackawanna is faced a strip mine permit.
someone commented this (edited for langauge):

"This seems like a good occasion to revisit the vapid assertion that publicity kills trout streams.

When ARS got a permit to discharge salt water into the river just above the Scranton/Taylor line, they argued that the river was impaired that far down and it couldn’t sustain a significant trout population, so the discharge wouldn’t really hurt anything. This was untrue. The discharge was above the best dry fly fishing on the river, and one of the few places in the country where wild trout over 20 inches are routine. But, the quality of the fishing wasn’t widely known. People like to keep such matters secret. It was such a well kept secret that nobody showed up at the DEP public meeting and the discharge permit was granted over very little opposition. Now, every year salt builds up in the sediment, and that just doesn’t bode well for mayflies.

Now, some other a****** want to rape the river in Moosic. Moosic doesn’t see much fishing pressure. It’s a secret, and it’s a shame that it was a secret, because it would be much harder to get this mining permit if businesses in Moosic made money from visiting fishermen.

To everyone who argues that publicity kills trout streams: is it OK to tell people that there’s a thriving population of big wild trout in Moosic now? Because if nobody knows they are there, they will be killed by surface mine permit 35860301."


Mining permit was granted.
Best fishing on that River IMO too.
 
k-bob wrote:
I believe I read that the wilderness trout stream list has existed since 1969... that's a shorter list so maybe people had that.

Now that the long natural reproduction list is featured on the agency's website, I'm sure more people must use it vs the 80s.
Click to expand...

First I heard of the wilderness list was mid or late 80s. My friend the deputy fish cop told me about it. One was very close to where my mother in law lived. That came in handy. ;-)

I'm betting the natural production list had been around for a long time. The one I am talking about identified them from Class A to D, and was somewhat descriptive of biomass as well as stream chemistry.

I'd take another look, but unfortunately I loaded it on a CD awhile back, and new computer doesn't have a CD drive. :roll:

I may have to fire up one of the old puters in my basement.
 
Sal, on the flip side of your 77, I've often heard the argument that more publicity (more friends) of a stream is a good thing.

I believe this is true in some cases, but certainly not all.

Once a stream is designated Class A, if almost always gets EV which means max protection. You can't fart in it without an environmental study. Minor exaggeration of course.

Sure some recovering streams (not class A) can use more "friends" but it is a double edged sword.

As far as the big rivers? I used to work near a brine water treatment facility on the Allegheny. They claimed to be removing all the metals. But what about the freakin salt? Shoreline stained white for a long ways downstream. I couldn't believe something like that would be approved. It can't be good, but probably looked way worse than it was.

 
No doubt but I still have to laugh.
Like the guy that assumes a mis handled trout is dead without knowing or a stream that is mentioned is now getting a pounding....
its a great assumption to assume that your best judgement is better than another without knowing the reasons.

Ex:
Guy on here shows a 25" brown trout he kept.

People get hot and complain.

Reason guy kept fish is because it was bleeding badly.

See people dont take the time to find out why or even set a real set of guidelines on this subject.

Instead we say your best judgement. Then blast those when the exercise it.
That is all.
 
Read all this and confused! Emotions are everywhere! Let's take the "Emotions". out of the picture and get to the brass tacks.

All talk in promoting fishing but all is kept secret. How do you promote with out opening your mouth! Many mumble and I can not hear! What did you say or what did you not say.

Fishing, starting from youth, I am sure glad, no mumbles, just well heard advice! But those advice givers are gone now! I guess they are lucky! Would have been sad the advice givers were given no advice. It would all be a secret that you take to the grave!


My advice, open up, teach and you shall learn. Happiness is always better shown, then kept a secret!


Spot burn, Seems to me, I can always tell a fisherman by the "Sun Burn".

Maxima12
 
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