Daily Herald | Posted: Monday, January 14, 2008 11:00 pm
Catching fish is so much fun that sometimes, when the fishing is good, we forget that our fisheries can't supply an endless quantity of fish. Eventually, we tend to kill the goose that laid the proverbial golden egg.
Let's look at three examples from our local reservoirs that prove the point.
After a particular rough few years for rainbows on Strawberry (the cutthroat were eating all the small fish), ice anglers found a large school of 12- to 14-inch rainbows in a bay on the Soldier Creek side. For the next few weeks, anglers pounded the area, taking limit after limit of rainbows home for supper. Though legal, and certainly justifiable in the minds of those who had been forced to release the vast majority of Strawberry fish for the previous decade, in less than a month that school of rainbows was pretty much destroyed. As I did the math, anglers had removed well over 2000 fish from a bay the size of a small parking lot. And, those rainbows have not appeared in same area since.
When viewers watched a local fishing show filmed on Deer Creek a few years back, they noted the exact spot where the host and his guests caught perch as fast as they could drop a line. For some reason, thousands and thousands of good-sized perch had stacked up close to shore in an easily accessible bay. The result: Dozens of anglers hammered the area for a month or so and, with liberal perch limits, took thousands of perch home for supper. However, if any of the anglers were to have taken note while cleaning their catch, they would have noticed that all the perch were females stuffed with eggs. That very next year, the perch population of Deer Creek crashed, and it hasn't recovered since.
Finally, there have been times that white bass, largemouth bass and walleyes have congregated in areas on Utah Lake. Many times, these spots are isolated, where warm springs enter the lake, at other times the fish congregate in current from inlets, rivers or streams.
I've watched as well-meaning anglers have hauled out five-gallon buckets full of fish day-in and day-out, until (amazingly) the fish stop biting.
If the truth were known, the fish stopped biting because they were actually already in someone's freezer.
We must learn to manage our own fisheries. Please don't take more fish home than you can eat in a meal. Catch-and-release angling will improve the catch rate and make us all better stewards of the resources with which God has blessed us.
• Don Allphin can be reached at remaxdoa@gmail.com.