I always err on the side of conservation. Here in the States there is a brutal discrepency in the statistics between the conservationist/industrialist sides. Statistics are often completely unusable, in my opinion. And one can easily gather statistics favoring their sides agenda. One thing you can be certain of is that there is great pressure on fish species all over the world. Overfishing, waterway re-development and pollution are just three of the more obvious ones.
But some fly fishermen are a threat to the fish populations as well. For example, I recently went up to one of Virginia's tiny jewels, the Rapidan River, and observed a pair of Yuppie fly fishermen, (if you will pardon the expression 'fishermen' please) that were in the act of what they percieved to be fishing. A nice long pool below a small plunging waterfall in this beautiful little freestone stream was entered by one of these men in chest high waders. He walked onto the gravel bed from the foot of the pool until he was up to his waist, within ten feet of the falls, and began thrashing the surface of the pool with a Mickey Finn of huge proportions. It was time for me to be a ruffian.
"Do you know what you are doing?"
"What ?" he answered, but not as in what am I doing, but as in what did you say.
"For one thing you are standing exactly where you should be fishing. Did you know that?"
I did not let him answer.
"And secondly you are killing unborn Brook Trout , probably by the hundreds if not thousands, every time you shuffle your feet. You are destroying the eggs."
"Are you a warden?"
"I am if I want to be," I answered, "and right now I want to be. Why don't you get out of the pool and fish from boulders and the bank for a while."
He complied as his friend stood mutely by following our conversation with quick snaps of his head.
"I'm not trying to be a p++ck. I just care a lot for these trout and must intervene sometimes on their behalf. You understand?"
He did.
I said, "Knock about ten pounds off of your tippet size and use something in a size ten hook that sinks. A nymph, perhaps. That way you might catch something. I don't think that the method that you have chosen is going to be productive today."
I rode off into the sunset. I should have broken their fly rods and told them to watch football for the rest of their lives. But believe it or not, I know that the future of fishing is in their hands. From their interest and thousands of others like them lies the basic fule that will provide for the safe future of these fish. Money. It is probably the most important thing for the conservation of anything natural in this world. Without ti, we lose.
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