TimRobinsin wrote:
lastly,
The priority needs to be on improving these fisheries so that trout fishing opportunities can continue to increase. fewer people are buying licenses for trout fishing because:
To the average person trout fishing in PA is not special in most places.
why do you want to make it easier to get people into special reg areas? because fishing IS special in those areas.
so why not take the reverse approach elevate more areas to standards that are found in special reg areas. create more quality fishing opportunities using these areas as an example of what you can do? why not elevate the quality of fishing in a majority of areas instead of lowering the standard and the quality of the fishing experience in a few?
I have fished very few (if any) DHALO areas that end up being destinations for future return. The only "special" aspect that I see about DHALO is that access is restricted to those who choose to fish a certain way, and since most anglers are bait fishermen, creating more special areas that restrict access to bait fishermen will not get more people involved in angling. Perhaps another way of saying this is that your idea of special is what most anglers would look at as exclusionary. We are on the inside looking out; most anglers are on the outside looking in.
That being said, I find the PFBC press release to be a bit odd, in the sense that the stream miles potentially affected by this are a drop in the river bucket, compared to all the stream miles in PA. So tweaking a regulation like this is going to have minimal impact on youth angling, at the expense of the support of the minority of anglers who currently can fish these areas.
To me, if there is a need to regulate anything, there is a simple solution. The water is C&R, or it is not. Scrap all the tackle regulations and manage the waters for where fish can be kept and where fish can't be kept. You eliminate all this silly bickering among angling factions that way, you simplify regulations, and you have a concept that anglers can simply understand.
PFBC could have avoided a bit of embarrassment with Pine Creek by not designating additional stream mileage as DHALO, only to have it change a few short months later to All Tackle C&R. Just extend the mileage and move directly to All Tackle and admit it is pandering to the Brown Trout Club private stocking. I believe I remember a tactic admission (from a video), where PFBC acknowledged it is not a biological move (data supports that water temps get too high the majority of the summers), but a nod to social pressures. And that is the reality of politics for a resource agency - biology plays a role, but so do social pressures.
Regarding public comment periods, I take a jaded view on them (not just PFBC, but all government agencies). About the only thing the comment periods appear to be good for is providing a means for people to vent. I guess public officials can say they gave people a chance to voice their opinion, but I'm not certain that public opinion ends up weighing heavily on final decisions. The cynic in me sees it as a means to gauge whether the backlash is large enough to need to change anything; if not, you've somewhat quantified who you've pissed off and whether that group is disposable or not. If officials find they grossly underestimated backlash, they might tweak a proposal (apparently there must have been a firestorm on the SGL hiking ban to get that proposal deleted from the January 27 agenda). I still submit comments, but I'm under no delusion that they actually have any impact.
