Good discussion - Iowa Fishing – General Discussion - Iowa Fishing – General Discussion

Well, back east (PA/MD) where I used to live and fish b4 moving out here in ’03, Trout fishing was kinda of broken into 2 styles.

1. Meat Fishing
2. Sport Fishing

Now, I took part in both and still do. So, don’t fly off the handle and think I am one of these fly-fishing snobs or one of these “good’ol boys” that kills everything they catch!

OK, so here’s kinda how it worked with me and many others. Many streams (and all ponds pretty much)stocked with trout lacked sufficient water quality to support breeding trout. This was essentially a put and take fishery during the months of April and May, so much so, that the trout opener in PA was almost as sacred as the first day of the deer rifle season just after Thanksgiving.

In those put and take streams, the predominantly stocked fish were rainbows. This is where you took your Mike’s fire balls (salmon eggs) and got a trout dinner.

In other streams, they have a system called “delayed harvest” where you’re not allowed to keep fish until mid-summer, when the water quality may be marginal in some stretches of streams and the fish would die anyway.

This made for great sportfishing in these “in between” streams, in that the fish were available for a longer period of time for sport fishing, but when waters warmed and the habitat got marginal, people could keep fish-though many of these streams would have deep holes with springs, so in reality some fish would usually make it through a hot summer.

Now, as far as fingerlings and brood fish went, they typically were stocked into higher quality streams/rivers with tighter regs (as they should be, in my opinion) where they had the greatest chance of survival. These were most often browns, because they can handle the warmer waters a little better than rainbows or brookies. Plus, they are quite predatory and can grow pretty fast in a fertile stream. One stream that was managed in this way (and my all time favorite PA stream) is the Little Juniata River. I flyfished on this water almost daily while spending some summers as a student at Penn State some 12-15 years ago. I caught some real bruisers from that river. It saddened me greatly in those days to see people keeping fish, in some cases, for all things as musky bait, from that awesome river. I think today, it is managed as an “all-tackle” trophy stream, with one large size fish (don’t know the size) as the daily limit. But, by the same token, there was an outflow from a small lake (top discharge-so the water was not cold per se) that was heavily stocked with catchable trout in April/May on the way to the “Little-J”, as the Little Juniata was known, and I would use an ultra-light spinning rig with waxworms to conjure up a fish dinner for me and my girlfried (now my wife of 12 years, sitting here with me). That outflow was a put-and-take fishery. Trout would not survive in the warm waters past early July or so.

So, to make a long story short, I think if the DNR is going to do this, which sounds a lot like what they are doing back East, they need to do 2 things. 1. Educate people on the trout fishing 2. Impose special regs on higher quality waters to protect the investment in fish and keep them available for sport fishing as much as possible. A fish in the fry pan is not gonna be there to give his fight tommorrow. That being said, they will do well to keep a put-and-take fishery viable as well to keep those opportuntities available. What you don’t want is people meat hunting in high quality trout waters that can support sportfishing throughout the year. Trophy regs would be the way to go on these higher quality waters. And, since put and take fishing is still allowed in some waters, everyone is happy…in theory.

Regards,

Joe