I feel like an onion these days. It seems like every time I hear any salmon or steelhead conservation news, it’s about another shut-down and there it goes, another layer of skin stripped away.
I fished the Thompson until March in the 80’s, then until last day of December in the 90’s up until they shut it down completely. I still have phantom limb syndrome on that river. Maybe phantom skin. Last month I had repeating dreams where just as I stepped in to the Hotel Run or the “Y”, the river turned to sand and my fly line lay motionless on a dune.
Then this winter my favorite river got shut down because they couldn’t get enough hatch brood stock for their egg take. Hatchery fish??? WTF....another layer....gone
Now the Sauk/Skagit. I caught my first winter-run steelhead on a fly on the Sauk back in the 70’s. They were special fish—-even when the water was cold they’d move for a fly. Boom. Another layer. Gone. And the Grande Ronde and Clearwater—-not enough returns. Shut down. Gone.
I sold my cabin on the Sol Duc....I could see the writing on that wall. Two months ago I pulled the plug on a new boat purchase after reading about impending MPA’s ——additional chinook fishing opportunities closing down.
Cyclical? Not to be the nattering nabob of negativism here, but I’d wager the word “cyclical” is the wishful thinking of someone like a fishing guide who makes his living on the back of a resource and he’s honing his optimism for another day by repeating the word “cycle” like a Buddhist mantra.
Meanwhile, I just saw the Feds in Alaska shut down the entire Gulf of Alaska Pacific cod fishery. When I used to sit in on fishery allocation meetings in Alaska back in the 80;s, that quota was over 200,000 MT. Now, I read that females aren’t spawning due to temperature increases and bio resource projections for that species have gone off a cliff. The remaining fish appear to be moving north into the Bering Sea looking for more favorable environmental conditions (i.e. colder water)
Meanwhile, First Nation crab fishermen in Nome reported that new thieves – cod and pollock – were robbing the bait from their pots....”new thieves”—— the unspoken meaning of that description is that cod and pollock historically didn’t show up that far north. Now here they are. Maybe a layer of skin stripped away for those guys, too.
And in Iceland the cod are moving north, replaced by mackerel. Someone’s shifting around the ocean furniture way faster then we projected this stuff would start happening and I’m not so convinced it’s going to be cyclical....
These things sit in the corner of my living room, sulking. What’s up, when are we getting out on the river they seem to be saying. Meanwhile, I’m starting to think they’re all going on Craigslist in the spring....with my 7 Avon inflatable rafts and my collection of Hardy Perfect Reels.....before the guys who think all this bad news is cyclical figure out the real reason..
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