Pennsylvania's Biggest Fishery Blunders

[sixfootfenwick]

Ignore the stockers. Fish it anyway. You’ll like it.

Better yet, harvest the stockers, add butter and peppers for a stream side lunch at the end of a fishing adventure . Eat and be happy knowing you did your part and just helped out the wilds.

 

[Gibbon]

Unfortunately almost 6 miles of the right hand branch is artificials catch and release. So be discreet if harvesting.

 

[Swattie87]

Better yet, harvest the stockers, add butter and peppers for a stream side lunch at the end of a fishing adventure . Eat and be happy knowing you did your part and just helped out the wilds.

That’ll work too. I bonked two Rainbows last time I was there. (This was on the LB.)

 

[blitzinstripes]

I think what makes me think blunder is the potential this project had. This was a chance for setting up the blue print for future projects on amd “dead” streams and a brook trout comeback.

It was a place where you could have done brown trout removal. No one would have cared. You could do habit improvements. No one would have cared. You could make it catch and release for brook trout. No one would have cared. You could have made it so it couldn’t be stocked by local clubs. Not a lot would have cared. You could have really played around with liming and ph levels and tributary impact and improvements. No one would have cared. You could have studied macro reintroduction attempts. Brook trout movement within a system. Etc. etc. etc.

It was the perfect place to experiment with a stream and brook trout recovery side by side. Without removing a popular thriving brown trout population. A chance to have something different. Study something different. Truly learn if a brook trout restoration on an entire water shed in PA was possible.

But now it’s stocked and the native brook trout are small. It isn’t just stocked with trout. I don’t think the largemouth bass, bluegill, bullheads and channel catfish it is also constantly stocked with help anything.

So yeah, improve water quality to have a potentially fully intact brook trout system. Instead it’s stocked with trout and warm water gamefish.

Blunder in my opinion

~5footfenwick

I still see the value in launching experimental stream projects such as this. We're either going to commit to figuring out what we need to do to restore native brook trout fisheries or we ain't. And there's really no time to continue to sit on the fence with it. We have to start somewhere and we need to be able to designate an experimental fishery(ies) to be the guinea pig. I refuse to take the extremist view of total eradication of non native species. (I believe there is room in PA for brown and rainbow trout.) But I definitely support working to preserve and restore native brook trout fisheries as much as possible.

 

[hockeyref]

Allowing the PFBC to continue to exist comes to mind *ducks*

Be careful what you ask for…… you know that if you put the govt in charge of a desert there would be a shortage of sand within 5 years. Why give them the opportunity to establish a “new and governmentally improved” PFBC”?