Damn You, Fish Commission!

Sunny, 65 degrees, and I was driving to town when I noticed coltsfoot blooming on the road verge. This may not seem like world-shattering news, but to a fly fisher, it means the Blue Quill Mayfly, the first significant hatch of the year, is now occurring. This marks the beginning of trout fishing.

Or it would, if Pennsylvania’s fishing laws were not stuck in the 1950’s. Despite shifting demographics, public demand, and scientific study; in the face of falling license sales and decreasing revenue; Pennsylvania’s Fish and Boat Commission clings to stocking hatchery “catchable” sized trout during a month-long closed season so they can profit from the brief, ever-decreasing spike of license sales just before Opening Day. Never mind that their own studies prove that most of these trout disappear within days of stocking, either via downstream migration, predation, or poaching. The one-weekend-a-year anglers gripe about lack of trout when it is merely bad management.

Fly anglers have lost a third of their season each year because “approved trout waters,” meaning stocked streams and lakes, are closed during three weeks or more of hatch activity. In the warmer areas of the state, trout activity may well be over by the end of May. The closed season has seemed a prejudicial policy against fly anglers since its inception. There are some stretches of some streams open to year-round fishing with flies or other artificial lures, but they are such a small percentage of all trout waters that they are outrageously crowded during the closed month. Demands for more have not only gone unanswered, but the PFBC has persistently tried to relax or eliminate the regulations in these areas. The fact that public outrage swells each time has not seemed to penetrate their preconceptions.

The Pennsylvania fishing model revolves around stocked trout. There are many more wild brook trout fisheries in the state than the PFBC is aware of, and plenty of waters with naturally-reproducing brown trout; even more that are healthy streams for “holding over” trout that might be managed more cheaply stocking fingerlings or egg boxes. These could be managed for what they are at a fraction of the cost of stocking them with “catchables”… and such stocking just reduces the chances of wild fish survival. The Commission has taken a few tentative steps towards preserving wild brook trout water, but lags decades behind the science of watershed management in this and less pristine types of habitat. It’s my opinion that stocking all the aforementioned types of waters with “catchables” damages the resource and should be curtailed. An opinion based on scientific studies that have been ongoing (mostly in other states) for over fifty years. That’s a lot of data.

Many stocked waters get too warm for trout to survive. Why are they stocked? For social reasons: They are close to large population centers and there is some demand for stock-catch-and-keep angling there. Fine. As long as there is a demand for this, do it. But to make the best use of those expensive hatchery trout, leave the season open year-round and publish the stocking schedule (as they do now for in-season stockings) so these urban anglers can be there when the trout are. Not several weeks after sixty percent of the trout have vanished.

Ever since the “trout stamp” was initiated, every trout fisherman in the state has subsidized these truck-followers’ activities. I, for one, am willing to (reluctantly) keep doing so, but could the state make more money with a “catch-and-release” or “trout resource management” stamp and a “trout stamp” for stock-catch-keep waters? You bet they could! Especially if they could reduce the numbers of costly hatchery catchable trout by putting them only in those stock-catch-keep urban creeks. The urban anglers would even see more trout dumped in their local waters; the rural anglers would see their wild trout flourishing. It’s a win/win.

That brings us back to the closed season. As the numbers of bait fishermen continue to decline and fly-fishing rises in popularity, a trend that has gone on for twenty years, a larger proportion of the state’s license-buyers are disgruntled and discouraged by their shortened season. Small wonder license sales have been declining. Opening all trout waters to year-round fishing would reverse the trend; publishing stocking schedules for stock-catch-keep waters would make up for the loss of the pre-Opening Day sales spike… and probably a little more, with a clever publicist.

Those of us who fish “beyond the stocking truck” for purely wild trout have had a loophole in the past: Wild Brook Trout Heritage waters were open year-round. That ended this year, as the PFBC has belatedly decided to officially classify such streams for their protection. That’s good, right? Not when they also have a misplaced mania for “simplifying” the laws for easier enforcement. You guessed it… these waters are now closed when Approved Trout Waters are. Not to protect the resource, as brook trout spawn in the fall; not to “protect” newly-stocked trout, as these waters aren’t stocked. Is it to spit in the eyes of us “elitist” fly fishers and our demands for scientific, resource-based watershed management? Or is it, as they insist, to “simplify regulations?” The simplest regulations of all would be a year-round open season on all trout waters.

So it was with a sense of anger and betrayal that I spotted those blooming coltsfoot today, and realized that I would never again enjoy the pleasure of fishing the first great Mayfly hatch of the season. Not unless they hatch well in the single special-regs area near me, a 1¾ mile-long stretch of Kettle Creek that is sure to be elbow-to-elbow with desperate fly fishers. Must I give up my treasured solitude and fish for stocked trout instead of wild ones? Or must I wait through the first half-dozen hatches until the state allows me to fish the waters I truly love?