Gear restricted water

I was going to include this in my post on fly fishing snobs, but that one got too long to include this, and besides, the issue is important enough to warrant its own post on the subject, so here goes.

First of all, what is gear restricted water, also known as quality fishing regulations? Well, it is kind of self-explanatory at first, the Michigan DNR imposes restrictions on the type of tackle that can be used while fishing for trout in hopes of improving the quality of the fishery. On some sections of some rivers, you are limited to using flies only, on other sections, you are limited to using artificial lures only, in both cases, no live bait is allowed. But these regulations become more convoluted as they often go hand in hand with special size and creel limits for each species of trout, some sections are no kill, other sections are reduced numbers of trout that can be kept. If all this sounds confusing, it is, very confusing at times. So how did this all come about?

 There are several reasons why gear restricted water regulations came into being. Supporters will tell you that they are all about improving the numbers and size of the trout in the rivers, opponents will tell you it is all about fly fishing snobs wanting their own special sections of rivers all to themselves’. Who’s right? Both sides. I am not trying to straddle the fence here, but to take an objective look at the subject.

Up until the mid-sixties, the idea was that the state DNR could raise enough trout in hatcheries to keep all fishermen happy. The state was flush with cash, and spent millions updating their existing hatcheries, and building new ones as well. But, by the seventies, problems with that idea began to expose themselves. The biggest was diseases, like Whirling Disease. Whirling Disease is caused by parasites that attack the skeleton and nervous systems of trout, causing the trout to become deformed to the point where then can no longer swim normally, but “whirl” forward in an awkward corkscrew-like pattern instead of swimming normally. The disease has a 90% mortality rate. The parasite that causes Whirling Disease is native to Europe, and the fish there have some immunity built up to the disease, not so for North American trout. The parasite was imported to North America along with trout that were being used as breeding stock for the hatcheries. And Whirling Disease was soon followed by other diseases as well, such as the viral hemorrhagic septicemia virus, or VHS.

Some years, the entire production for a hatchery for a year had to be destroyed to prevent the spread of these diseases, and we were lucky here in Michigan. For the most part, the fish stocks in the rivers were relatively unaffected by those diseases compared to many other states, particularly, Colorado, where they are still trying to fight the diseases and maintain the fishery there. The mortality rate for trout in some Colorado rivers is close to 90%, due to planting infected fish from hatcheries. Putting millions of trout fry together into small tanks is asking for the spread of what could be devastating disease outbreaks, so hatcheries began to lose flavor with fish biologists. Hatchery fish also began to lose flavor among some trout fishermen who longed to catch more wild trout, which are typically better fighters, and more brightly colored than their hatchery counterparts.

It costs millions to operate the hatcheries, it costs millions more to track down new diseases and their causes when they hit, and it costs even more millions to come up with ways to prevent the newer diseases, and what do we get in return? Put and take fishing for small, weak, dumb trout. Hatchery trout are as dumb as rocks, they don’t even know what to eat when they get dumped into a river, so they try to eat anything that doesn’t eat them. They don’t know there are larger trout and other critters that love to eat small trout, so the hatchery fish are easy pickings for fishermen, other trout, kingfishers, otters, herons, cranes, and so on and so on. Luckily, very few of the hatchery fish survive more than a few days. I say luckily because of the way they are planted. The trucks from the hatcheries are limited as to where they can get to in order to dump off the fish, so where they do get dumped, the hatchery fish overwhelm the rivers. You have thousands of small fish that are used to being packed in like sardines, eating anything and everything that is edible in the river, taking food away from the native fish. There is no automatic feeder that kicks on every so often to release the scientifically determined amount of food into the river like there is at the hatchery.

For full disclosure, I used to be one of those who fished the put and take trout. The first plantings in the Rogue River every year took place about the time that steelhead fishing was winding down. On the days when the steelhead were slow, I would often switch over to my fly rod and catch the hatchery trout that had just been planted. Every fish seemed to be identical to the one before it and the one after it, cookie cutter fish mass-produced at the hatchery. Spud would sit on the bank making fun of my fly fishing abilities, and the hatchery fish. Even though Spud didn’t fly fish, he was certainly a fish snob. Thinking back, those were the only times when Spud would sit and watch me fish, most of the time it was the other way around, but he couldn’t lower himself to fish the put and take trout. It didn’t help that the most productive fly on most days was the “kibble” fly, tied to resemble the fish chow that the hatchery fish had been fed at the factory, I mean hatchery. What I didn’t know at the time was that fishing for the put and take trout was ruining me as a fly fisherman. In between plants, I couldn’t catch a trout.

 To Regular Joe Fisherman, those put and take trout are just fine. He gets to go to the river, catch a mess of trout for dinner, and he has a good time. Sure, he’ll complain about the lack of any big fish, but he’ll blame the DNR for that. There’s really nothing wrong with that I suppose, but some of us want more. I learned that lesson from fishing the Pigeon River Country, when I finally learned how to catch real trout on a fly that didn’t look like fish chow. Catching wild trout is something special, each fish is different, each one has its own personality, its own color, and I learned they come in different sizes than barely legal. Some of them get big, really big! That is, if they are given the chance to survive long enough to get big.

 Yet when the DNR first announced its quality fishing regulations for gear restricted waters, I wasn’t fully convinced they were a good thing. My transformation into a fly fishing snob wasn’t complete yet. The catch and release part was no problem for me, I was already letting all the fish I caught go back, and there was a part of me that thought “Yes! Stretches of some of my favorite rivers to fish are going to be open to only fly fishermen. There will be less fishing pressure on those rivers, I’ll catch even more and even larger trout than before!”. But then I thought, “Hey, wait a minute here, that means I have to use only flies, and there are still some days I use bait or spinning tackle. Oh well, I can live it the new regulations, they only cover a few miles of a few rivers. No big deal.”

I could understand how many fishermen would be upset over the new rules, there was a part of me that was as well. Even though I was on my way to becoming one of them, I thought the new rules were the work of the fly fishing snobs to keep us heathens off from their “holy” water. That’s when I learned the difference between real fly fishing snobs and the poser fly fishing snob slobs. The poser snobs do use those regulations to keep the heathens off from their “holy” water, except to the poser snobs, it is only holy water because it is famous, and they don’t want to share the water with any one, not even other fly fishermen.

Being the curious type, I wondered why The DNR and fishery biologists across the country were coming up with these new regulations. A lot of my information I got from Spud, since he was going to school to become a wildlife biologist of some type, he was up on all these things. But, I also read countless articles in magazines and newspapers as well, and still do. There are many reasons behind the gear restricted regulations, and back then, even though they may not have admitted it, fishery biologists didn’t really know very much about the fish, or what effects fishing had on the populations of fish in the rivers. One thing they had learned was that minimum only size limits weren’t enough to sustain a healthy, viable fish population in our rivers. The idea behind the minimum size limits was to allow the trout to get old enough to reproduce, so there would be less reliance on hatcheries, and more natural reproduction. But it didn’t work out that way. What biologists found out was happening is that in many rivers, as soon as a trout reached the minimum size, it was caught and removed from the gene pool. Biologists also found that just as with people, trout vary in size. There are trout with genes that tend to cause them to grow larger, and there are trout with genes that tend to cause them to remain small. What was happening in our rivers, and lakes as well, was that minimum only limits were producing a population of stunted fish. For example, here in Michigan, the minimum size for trout was 10 inches. But, there were trout that began to reproduce when they were 6 to 8 inches long, and their offspring tended to reproduce at 6 to 8 inches long, so our rivers were becoming filled with smaller fish that seldom grew large enough to be kept under the minimum size rules.

One thing is certain, each mile of trout stream can feed “X” number of pounds of trout. That isn’t the number of trout a stream can feed, but the total number of pounds of trout. What that number is depends on the river and the food supply available for the trout to eat, and the size of the trout in the stream. If that number is made up of large numbers of trout too small to keep, then there won’t be food available for larger trout there for fishermen to catch and keep. Conversely, you could have a river where there were very few trout, but all of them being very large to make up the total number of pounds. Ideally, you would have a mix of sizes, which is what there was before man came along to mess things up. You would have some large trout to reproduce and pass on their genes to future generations, and the large trout would prey on the smaller trout, keeping their numbers in check to prevent them from dominating the trout populations, but there would be some small trout left to grow to be large trout. You can change the number “X”, but I won’t go into that here, I’ll save that one for a later post.

Fishery biologists came up with several ideas on how to overcome the problems they were having at the hatcheries, and the problems caused by the minimum size limits. One was what are known as “slot” limits. I hate to even try to tackle them here, as they are very confusing, but the basic idea was to limit the numbers of fish kept by fisherman within certain size ranges, while at the same time, lowering the minimum size limit, so fishermen would keep more of the smaller fish. In theory, a great idea, but not very practical in my opinion. There were different regulations for different rivers, even different stretches of the same river, and it was hard to keep track of what you were allowed to keep where. To tell you the truth, I didn’t keep up on those regulations, since I release all fish, they didn’t apply to me, and I didn’t want to waste my time reading and learning the regulations when I could be fishing instead.

Which brings us to the gear restricted waters, quality fishing regulations. The regulations limit you to artificial lures or flies only, and also have very restrictive creel limits, much of the water covered is no kill, you have to release all fish caught. I have to apologize for not being more specific, but my copy of the fishing regulations is in my vehicle so I have it when I need it, rather than here in the apartment where it does me no good. In case you haven’t figured it out by now, I support these regulations, only because there isn’t a better way of accomplishing what these regulations attempt to do.

The idea is that if you limit the number of fish taken from one stretch of a river, that the entire river will benefit eventually. That is because if you give the largest fish a chance to reproduce, they will, and the trout they produce will be large as well. Since each stretch of river can only hold so many fish, eventually, these larger trout will spread out through the entire river system for every one to catch. that’s the idea anyway.

The idea behind artificial lures and flies only is that the mortality rate for fish hooked on bait is so high, it isn’t worthwhile releasing such fish back into the river, they will die anyway. And the point to these regulations is to have more trout living in the rivers, and more trout to reproduce on their own to repopulate the rivers, rather than relying on hatcheries. If you let a river return to the most natural state it can, we won’t have to rely on hatcheries to produce trout.

Anything that moves us away from our reliance on hatcheries is a good thing in my opinion. They are in some ways, an ecological disaster in the making. Not only is the possibility of spreading diseases a huge threat, but there are other problems with them as well. This doesn’t apply so much to Michigan, but out west, where they have many more species and sub-species of trout than we do, hatchery fish are wiping out populations of the native species that once made certain rivers extra special. And, no matter how you cut it, hatchery fish are inferior to wild fish. A wild fish has to fight for survival from the moment of its birth. Learning to escape predators, fighting river currents, doing all the things that make wild trout stronger and smarter than their hatchery raised cousins that mill around in a tank waiting for the automatic feeder to drop fish chow. A hatchery fish is protected and coddled from birth, it costs a small fortune to raise them to legal size, and it’s cost prohibitive to raise them to trophy size. That money would be better spent on improving the rivers so that they can hold and produce more wild trout.

 There are those that call for the DNR to build more hatcheries to produce more fish, but the hatcheries cost millions of dollars to build, maintain, and operate, and the same people who call for more hatchery fish scream bloody murder if the DNR raises the fees for a fishing license to pay for those hatcheries. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. It wouldn’t do any good to plant more fish anyway, the rivers can’t support more fish, so why plant more than the rivers can sustain?

There’s no way the DNR can please every one, from those who don’t want any gear restricted water at all, to those who want to see every hatchery shut down and every inch of every river to be flies only, catch and release. We just went through the entire debate again here in Michigan, as the DNR added another 70 odd miles of rivers to the list of gear restricted waters, including two of my favorite stretches of rivers to fish. I should be over joyed, right? After all, the DNR just added my favorite stretch of the Pigeon River in the Pigeon River Country, and the upper Manistee from CR 612 to M 72 bridge to the list.

I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand, I know fishing will get even better on both rivers, and if there was ever a stretch of river that should be managed for wild trout, it is the Pigeon in the Pigeon River Country. On the other hand, as I wrote in my post “Confessions of a Fly Fishing Snob“, I fish for beauty, and those are two of Michigan’s most beautiful stretches of trout streams. I hate to see them being put off-limits to some people based solely on how they choose to fish, for I don’t mind sharing their beauty, and I know there are bait fishermen who appreciate the beauty of those rivers as much as I do, even if it may not be in exactly the same way. After all, I started fishing both with bait as a youngster, and now, with the new regulations, I would never be able to do that. Those two stretches of rivers are what started me on the journey that has led to my becoming a fly fishing snob, I am not sure I want to see others banned from taking their first steps on that same journey.

The stretch of the Manistee from CR 612 to M 72 bridge points out something else in the debate as well, business. The designation of that stretch of river is conditional, on campground revenue to the DNR. The DNR operates 3 or 4 campgrounds on that one stretch of river, depending on how you look at it. The DNR considers the equestrian campground at Goosecreek to be a separate entity from the Goosecreek State Forest campground, I tend to lump them both together, since they adjoin one another. If campground revenues fall too much at the campgrounds on that stretch of river, the regulations will be rescinded. We would like to think that regulations are about the fish and rivers, but the truth is, money drives many of the regulations.

 I, for one, don’t want to see Michigan become like England, where they have to pay the landowners along the rivers huge sums of money for the privilege of fishing the rivers, and to only fish in certain ways. For example, if you were to try to fish the fabled Test or Chalk Rivers in England, you would have to pony up thousands of dollars to set foot in them, and you are only allowed to fish dry flies, casting upstream to rising fish. If you spend your money and don’t see a fish rise, you don’t even make a cast, but to some, it’s worth it. Not me.

That is beginning to happen in the western United States as well, where you have to pay to fish, that is pay the landowners for access to the rivers. As I said, I fish for beauty, and I hate to see access to that beauty denied to others, and I am afraid that’s where we are headed. Some of the things said by “my side” in the restricted gear debate worry me profoundly, like “Fishing isn’t a right, it’s a privilege”. Statements like that raise my hackles immediately, for I worry that we will restrict access to the beauty of rivers to only those that are “worthy”, with “worthiness” being determined by the size of some one’s bank account.

If there is a sport that is a right, it is fishing, for fishing is a basic way of feeding one’s self, and family. I don’t think we should ever start down the slippery slope of determining that a basic means of survival is a privilege, and any fisherman who says otherwise better be careful, because there are far too many people who would like to see your “privileges” taken away as well. There are those extremists in the environmental and animal rights movements that would like to see all fishing banned, especially catch and release, which they consider to be torturing fish for the sake of torturing them. When fly fishermen start calling fishing a privilege rather than a right, they are opening the door to have the right to fish taken away from all of us.

Mr. Regular Joe Fisherman, now that I have defended your right to fish, I have a favor to ask of you. Please stop abusing that right! There are far too many of you who think you’re Robin Hood putting one over on the Sheriff of Nottingham when you violate fish and game laws, and I think we all know what I am talking about here. I’ve talked to far too many of you who brag about catching so many fish that you ended up throwing a bunch of them away because you couldn’t clean them all, or I should say, didn’t want to bother cleaning them all. The DNR is not the sheriff of Nottingham, and those aren’t the King’s fish you’re killing for no reason, they are OUR fish! Those fish belong to all of us who love to fish, and the DNR is there to protect them so they will be there for all of us. Every fish you kill for no reason is a fish that won’t be there for myself, or you, to catch the next time. Are you really so dense that you can’t see that? I hate to be so blunt, but I’ll be on a river talking to a Regular Joe Fisherman, and he’ll be complaining about the fishing that day, when he tells me about how many he caught, kept, and threw away, on an earlier day. You can blame the DNR for not planting enough, or for the fishing regulations you hate, or the Indians, but until you clean up your act and stop destroying fish for no reason other than you think you’re getting away with something,which is childish in the first place, there won’t be fish for you to catch! I’ve tried explaining that to those of you that I’ve met, but you always find some one else to blame, it is you who are to blame.

Regular Joe Fisherman may say “What’s the big deal if I keep an extra fish or two now and then?”, what they have a hard time seeing is that there are millions of him thinking the same thing. If they each keep just one extra fish per year, it adds up to the entire output of a fish hatchery for a year. We’ve already lost, or almost lost, too many species of animals here in Michigan already. There used to be buffalo, elk, moose, grayling, sharptail grouse, and wild turkey throughout the state, just to name a few. Some have been re-introduced like elk, moose and turkey, and other than turkeys, the numbers are small and the ranges the animals live in is limited. It may surprise some of you to learn that turkeys were wiped out in Michigan, it wasn’t until the 70’s that they were re-introduced here. Some people even complain there aren’t enough deer here in Michigan for the hunters, you should have tried hunting back in the 50’s or 60’s, when the number of deer in the state was about half of what it is now.

What I am getting at is this, we all have a responsibility to protect the flora and fauna, here in Michigan and elsewhere. You may think there are so many of a particular species that it would be impossible to wipe it out, but history proves otherwise. We can, and have, wiped out entire species by overhunting and overfishing, and it’s time to put an end to it, NOW! You may ask what  those other species I mentioned have to do with trout fishing, and the answer is this, I fish for beauty. I may be fishing for trout, but I think it’s beautiful when I see deer and elk coming to the river to drink. I think it’s beautiful to see an eagle soaring over the river. I think it’s beautiful to see and listen to the birds singing in the trees and bushes along the river. I think the wildflowers in bloom along the river banks are beautiful, and I think trout are beautiful.

And speaking of cleaning up your act, that would help too. It surprised me to learn that the vast majority of land owners along the rivers with restrictive gear regulations support those regulations, and that property owners have pushed for more of those restrictions. I would have thought that they would be those most opposed to the DNR telling them how they could fish, after they spent the big bucks to buy property along the rivers, but they’re not. The reason doesn’t surprise me though, the property owners are tired of cleaning up after the Regular Joe Fishermen who think the river banks are one giant trash receptacle. I know that not all of you do that, but way too many do. I fish for beauty, that’s also why I kayak, and seeing your empty bait containers, bottles, cans, food wrappers, broken lawn chair, or whatever else you’ve left behind, strewn along the riverbanks is not a thing of beauty, and I’m tired of cleaning up after you, as are the property owners. I have met many property owners along rivers and the conversation with them started out badly, until they see that my net is filled with trash I have picked up while fishing. Ninety percent of the time, their attitude changes 18o degrees, when they see that, and I have even gotten invitations to use their property for access to the river, just because I was cleaning up other people’s trash.

So if I am a fly fishing snob, and I have confessed that I am, too many of you Regular Joe Fishermen are game hogs and/or outright pigs along the river. I know those are in the minority, but they spoil it for the rest of us. I may support gear restricted/quality fishing regulations, but only because there is no other way to accomplish the goal of protecting and preserving trout fishing for everyone. I don’t really like the idea of limiting who has access to the beauty of our rivers, based on their prefered method of fishing, but there is no other way that I know of.

 In a perfect world, you wouldn’t need precision measuring devices, a team of lawyers, and a team of surveyors to tell you if the fish you just caught is legal or not, where you caught it. In a perfect world, people would realize fish hatcheries and planting more fish is not the answer. In a perfect world, people would realize that the number of fish is limited, and would limit their own take with out the DNR telling them. In a perfect world, there wouldn’t be game hogs who believe that they have the right to kill any and all the fish they catch. In a perfect world, there wouldn’t be pigs who despoil our beautiful rivers with their trash that they are too lazy to pick up. And in a perfect world, there wouldn’t be this divide between fishermen based on their methods of fishing, because I don’t find that to be beautiful in the least.

But, we don’t live in perfect world, we live in a human would, far from perfect, and with human nature being what it is, I guess we’ll have to live with the gear restricted/quality fishing regulations until human nature changes. But hey, if any of you Regular Joe Fisherman would like to give fly fishing on some of the “holy” waters a try, I would be happy to take you along, let you borrow one of my rods, and introduce you to the beauty that is fly fishing. I am all about making converts.

April 13, 2011 | Categories: Fly Fishing | 1 Comment