Should you be able to fish for downstreamers ?

[jbird]

. I often just plain forget to pinch it

Keep some pliers with your fly tying stuff. Pinch em before you even chuck it up in the vise.

I have definitly found it way easier to remove a barbless hook....from the fish and myself It may not kill em, but it tears em up way worse than barbless. When the fishing is hot, your fly lasts a lot longer barbless, just from the abuse of getting it out of the fish. It'll come loose from snags a little more often too. Lots of good reasons to fish barbless, even if the mortality isnt higher with barbs.

Jay

[Darian]

To quote jhaquett:

I am completely 100% against the keeping of any wild fish, and about 95% against the keeping of a fish period.

Lets see if I understood Covelo's earlier post.... If we are to accept that there is a finite amount of habitat available for a particular river/stream and that habitat can only support a specific number of fish, if hatchery fish are then introduced, that habitat will not support the additional load of hatchery fish. That being the case, wouldn't releasing hathery fish mean that the number of fish in excess of the carrying ability of the river/stream die from starvation, etc. IMHO, if I'm correct, should we not release hatchery reared fish No question about releasing natural fish, here. There're several other reasons that I've read for keeping hatchery bred fish in addition to the foregoing.

[jhaquett]

Absolutely, if ALL forces of human impact could be stopped, then yes we should stop releasing hatchery fish. Hatcheries are used to take the pressure off of wild fish because we all know that the majority of the human race is much more concerned with themselves ($, water, food, etc) than they are with nature's well being. The true sportsman like the majority of the people on this board will put nature in front of themselves, so we should do all we can (C&R, de-barbing, not fishing for vulnerable fish, etc) to make up for the irresponsible actions of the people around us.

Of course, if we were to truly put nature in front of ourselves, we would stop fishing altogether , not gonna happen, but we can do all we can to make fishing a more conservation-minded sport!

[ycflyfisher]

I agree with almost all the points Covelo is getting at here. Just a couple of additional comments:

I believe the take of wild fish was allowed there because it was the only river in Calif that had a stable population over the last few decades. Not all rivers were experiencing population declines when steelhead were federally listed and CandR regs were mandated.

Agree 100%. Most seem to be under the impression that C&R has been implemented on CA streams because it does increase population abundance and it's being used as a management tool to increase abundance. Not true. The reality is that C&R is the only option other than disallowing fishing because every ESU aside from the Smith in CA is listed as threatened under the Fed ESA.

The problem with comments like "a dead fish cannot spawn" is that they ignore the primary precept of wildlife management. That being that species over produce during reproduction therefore sustainable harvest can take place without endangering a population. Yes, a dead fish cannot spawn, but killing a fish has no effect on the population unless you kill more than the population can produce. This is basic science. The other side of this coin is that you can release all the fish and not increase the population size if the population is already at saturation. "
This is a point I have argued many times before regarding the American River where IMO the limiting factor on population size is the amount of habitat, not fishermen. This is where Lee's comments that this is a feel good measure would be true, since the only way to increase the population size for rivers already at saturation is to improve the habitat, with more water being a good starting point in most cases in Calif. The other point that should be made is that saturation refers to fry in the river, not the number of adult spawners though that can also be saturated if the amount of suitable spawning ground is limited such as in the American and Feather Rivers. Biologists can calculate the number of fry a river can sustain based on the surface area, water temp, and other factors. Therefore, any number of fry above this capacity will likely perish before out migration to the ocean. Since steelhead have to spend at least one year in freshwater this becomes a limiting factor, so you can see how you can add more spawners but not increase the number of smolts. Therefore, as long as there are enough spawners to attain saturation with fry, fishermen can kill as many spawners as they want without effecting the size of the population.

Agree totally with your conclusion, but not necessarily the exactness of all the mechanics as you've explained them. Virtually everyone that's argued in this thread that C&R does increase abundance because "a dead fish can't spawn" seems very much to be operating under the misconception that more spawners leads to more YOY which leads to more returning adult steelhead. Make no mistake, unless your talking about a population that has been so drastically reduced to the point where extirpation becomes a short-term possibility/probability this is a factual misconception. Agree totally with the points you've made about survival of YOY up to the point of smoltification and outmigration. The one thing I would add is a breif comment on stock and recruitment. Adding more spawners(Stock) to the equation can to a point result in more Recruitment. After you reach that point, R productivity actually drops off. This effect is much more pronounced in anadramous populations where each spawner has more potential for R over the base line if the fish were on a FW fitness/growth curve. This has to do with a myriad of factors, the most influential of which vary from watershed to watershed. An example would be An abundant- higher-density population of S often forces a percentage of the population to select less than ideal, non-productive spawning sites and also far increases the chances that later arriving spawners will select previously utilized sites and blast already developing embryos right out of the substrate. This is far more complex than it seems on the surface, but basically what it arrives at is that smaller, lower density populations are more productive at efficiently creating viable progeny than are larger populations. When you factor in vast amount of habitat that we've not only destroyed but most importantly degraded, it really doesn't take a whole lot of stock for most populations to reach surplus abundance. Again, I could try to explain this in more detail but all this is discussed in Upstream clearly and concisely to degrees that will give anyone that takes the time to read it and actually wants to understand the factors involved that are pertinent to this discussion, a rudimentary understanding of the concepts involved, and what the actual vehicles are that allow anadramous populations to build and sustain abundance.

There are simply a myriad of other factors some of which anglers can directly control that they never give a second thought about that have much more of an impact on abundance.

C&R has become something of a mantra, almost like a religion in most flyfishing circles. As far as anadramous fish are concerned, it's founded in blind faith and little else IMO. This seems to me to be a knee jerk reaction when an angler sees another angler kill a wild fish. Anglers can't see the destruction that an El Nino event that limits the productivity of the North Pacific causes to a population in the salt. They can't see the damage that incidental commerical catch results in. They can't see what a displaced pinnaped population can do. They can't see what hundreds of thousands of hatchery bred, overgrown smolts do to the streamborn YOY that have just emerged from the gravel for any particular watershed on their downstream migration to get what usually results in a return of less than 1%. The list is virtually endless.

The arguement that C&R is angler controllable and the above factors are not doesn't hold water IMO. Most anglers that practice C&R religiously fail to even consider what damage they're doing to incubating substrate with their feet while C&Ring fish all day long, long after the spawners are gone but the embryos are still there. They fail to see that this not only can have a pronounced effect on recruitment when multiplied by countless angler hours, but that most fry simply become an ever important portion of the food chain that reduces survivabilty as a whole. I'm sure that the vast majority of the flyanglers in the endless armada of drift boats that turn a tiny little stream barely flowing at 400cfs into a virtual pinball alley are cursing every angler that they see stringering a hatchery fish on the way down for their evils, but fail to even consider that their collective flotilla is effectively scouring the substrate of every tongue of every tailout that's shallow enough to be prime viable spawning substrate from Lewiston to Junction City. Yet someone stringers a sole wild fish on the Smith and we're collectively ready to send out the hanging party. Seems like more of an emotional response than enything else to me, but I realize I'm in the minority here.

[mike-n]

Flip flopper! I thought your were gone for good.

Welcome back!

MN

[Darian]

Yep,.... I knew there were some members around who really knew their stuff about this subject...

[Covelo]

C&R has become something of a mantra, almost like a religion in most flyfishing circles. As far as anadramous fish are concerned, it's founded in blind faith and little else IMO. This seems to me to be a knee jerk reaction when an angler sees another angler kill a wild fish. Anglers can't see the destruction that an El Nino event that limits the productivity of the North Pacific causes to a population in the salt. They can't see the damage that incidental commerical catch results in. They can't see what a displaced pinnaped population can do. They can't see what hundreds of thousands of hatchery bred, overgrown smolts do to the streamborn YOY that have just emerged from the gravel for any particular watershed on their downstream migration to get what usually results in a return of less than 1%. The list is virtually endless.

I would add another to that list. Introduced species, especially striped bass -- call it a mantra on mine.

[bigtj]

A dead horse can't spawn either .

[Darian]

I'm with Carl.... But, now when I keep one for the table, I won't feel quite as guilty....

[lee s.]

Like Carl and Darian, ONLY what is used at the table tonight is kept.....occasionally....ANY fishery that gets targeted from here. Sometimes bigger type fishes have to live a couple days in the freezer though, until finihed.
And it SHOULD be without guilt.
Nature provides for the predator but NOT for waste. If a fish deposits 2000-2500 eggs, 1998-2498 of them are figured by nature to be expendable back to the environs (of which we are still part of, I think) at some time during their journey to adulthood and reproduction, and population status quo will be maintained for said available envirioment. Or something like that.