There's a lot of different topics all kind of crammed into this thread, but I'll give it a try.
SNP - Taken individually, your experience on that wild stream in York County shouldn't necessarily be taken as a microcosm of the situation on wild trout streams in PA as a whole. When you're just looking at one stream, there are too many individual factors that can affect trout populations from year to year, and too many factors that can affect how it fishes from day to day within a season. In the end, there's no way to tell whether having a spinner fisherman on the stream affected things or not...my guess is any impact from the spinner guy(s) is relatively minimal in the grand scope of all the factors affecting the stream. You can't even be sure if any fish were harvested by the spin guys or not. I still fish spinners occasionally, some with treble hooks (although debarbed), and don't notice any difference in the health of a fish after landing them on a spinner vs. fly gear. They generally speaking can be landed faster with spin gear and even with a treble it's rare that they are hooked by more than one point...if you're careful when removing the hook they are no worse off than they would be hooked with a fly. Just the nature of how a spinner is fished makes it tough for them to get the hook very deep. Bait fishing with treble hooks is a different story however.
That said, I largely agree with the majority trend in the thread of decreasing the harvest limits. Yeah, I guess ideally there should be different regs on stocked streams vs. wild streams, but many streams have both stockers and wild fish, and this just creates a mess to attempt to regulate and enforce...not to mention the whole separate debate about whether we should be stocking fish over naturally reproducing populations which I won't go into here. Keeping with the KISS theory I think the following change would make sense...for all non special reg trout streams in PA regardless of stocked/wild/mix.
1. Change the size minimum to 10". This basically makes nearly all wild Brook Trout sublegal, and probably 90% of wild freestone Browns. Sure Browns/Bows in the limestoners grow bigger, but many of those are already special regs streams. Most stockers are at least 10" so this incease in the size limit should have no effect on whether they can be harvested or not. In the end you can accomplish a lot with this change...protect Native Brookie populations and better target the removal of the stockies instead of wild fish.
2. Drop the creel limit to 3 fish/day. 3 10"+ fish are big enough to make a good meal for the angler for a day. If it isn't, there's always the supermarket. Besides, anyone eating 3 fish/day, every day from our waters is probably taking some serious health risks.
As with any regs though, the key is getting the angler to be a sportsman, and know them and abide by them.
