Because we’re deeply concernend about the well being of the slackers who read this blog our valuable readership, we’re posting yet another of our “Sign of the Coming Fishing Apocalypse” series.
In this case, it’s the Missouri Trout Season opener – an event that apparently requires the celebration of a great many fishermen:
Ahh, the solitude. The quiet. The contemplation. The ability to get back to nature.
To our friends in the “Show Me” state; let us know when it’s over.
Today’s Question for the Undergrounders: What percentage of the trout that are caught will be fair hooked?
(Subquestion A: Would you fish if it looked like this every day, or simply sink the hook right into your left temple and get on with life?)
See you anywhere but above, Tom Chandler
(found via The Fin’s twitter feed)
I’d rather eat cat sh_t on a cabbage leaf than participate in that goat rodeo.
Andrew Phillips(Quote)
I live in MO and that is a photo of a “trout park”. You pay $3 a day to fish and you can keep four fish. The catch and keep season in these parks run from March 1 to late fall. They stock DAILY 2.25 fish per expected angler based on that day’s average from previous years. There are four parks in our state that allow this. There are plenty of empty trout streams in fish when the meat hounds are in the park. I only fish the parks when I want to keep a few fish, we don’t keep them from the wild streams around here.
Bruno Greco(Quote)
That’s completely insane.
Dave Neal(Quote)
Why should this bother me? I see ample parking, cascading ripples at regular intervals, and a sine-curved shoreline. Of course it’s not a remote creek full of wild trout. Somewhere there is an engineer or landscape architect looking at this photo with a broad smile on his/her face: a repeating pattern of hemispheres on the shoreline maximizes surface area!
It’s definitely not the kind of place that I’d spend time fishing now, but as a kid I fished a city pond that was pretty similar to this. It lacked any semblance to a functioning ecosystem (if you looked under the hood), but there were fish in it. And my grandfather was willing to endure the humiliation of fishing a public pond in order to share the excitement of fishing with my cousins and me. I was too young to enjoy hiking into a remote stream to chase wild fish then, but those city pond experiences lit a fire in me that has since led to more remote locations and a conservation ethic. So I say let the trout parks be. They may not be your cup of tea, but not everyone is raised by a pack of wolves. Most of us need a gradual introduction to the ways of the wild.
Catfish(Quote)
My youth included numerous occasions like this. Forgive me, didn’t know better. Dynamic always the same: arrive early, stake out a good spot, then attempt to defend it from drunken rednecks. By the starting gun time, noon usually, all of your effort would be for naught as some toothless grandma had set up a lawn chair on your left foot and was heaving weighted trebles with sixty corn kernels impaled acrosst your bows.
One memorable very dry spring, the creek was reduced to half its flow and all the stocked trout were huddled in several pools in plain sight. I remember the terrible dismay as people appeared and cut in, halving and halving my angle, mobbing up around the hole until it was completely ringed. Even the hatchery trout were agitated and quivering. Guys waded out until they were standing in front of other people. Somebody suggested we all take turns, with numbers according to who had arrived first. It became clear almost immediately that the options were some kind of democratic system like that, or a fight. With about half an hour to go, somebody threw a handful of corn in the water and I remember it showering down on the trout in slo-mo, no sign of any feeding activity. They started slinging at about 11:45 and I withdrew, never taking a cast. Instead I fished carefully wherever people weren’t and actually caught a couple of stockers that magically appeared from behind a small rock or from under an invisible culvert edge. By about 4 PM most people had left and I returned to a place where two streams joined–there had been an honest fifty men there at noon. Only a few trout had been caught and in the clump of fish was a real beast, mid-20 inches, certainly a brood fish turned out to raise the pulse of all of Albemarle County. In four or five hours, I’ll bet a thousand casts landed on or around that fish. I tied on a 13-cm rapala, shouldered into position, and made a cast among all the corn-lines. That big fish cut out of the pack and whacked it on the first pass, probably out of sheer corn-rejecting fury, and I had the distinct pleasure of chasing it down the pool and back again, discommoding all of those grumbling hillbillies, for about five minutes. It was a brookie, by the way, an old whore of a hatchery queen bee, went nearly four pounds, and my last opening-day stocked fish ever.
dave
Davem(Quote)
My first ever fishing experiece was not like this. I feel sorry for the kids that have their introduction to fishing in this kind of environment; but I gotta respect Catfish’s evolution, and who knows what kids in that group will turn out like him? Me? Nope, I can’t bring myself to go there. My daughter caught her first fish on the Tuolumne near Mount Dana. See my article about it, “She Caught Her First Fish”.
Kentucky Jim(Quote)
Because of my sunny disposition I always try to see the positive in everything, and from what I can tell, with so many guys lining the bank of that river(?), it would be impossible for someone to low-hole another.
Kirk(Quote)
I’m all for this. Near as I can tell, that’s about 400 rubberheads that aren’t poaching my favorite spots.
Mark Coleman(Quote)
i will not say where i live though some will figure it out.
i can usually fish all day for wild trout without seeing anyone else on the water
i am single and i am in heaven on earth
Jerry(Quote)
Bruno is right. As a fellow Missourian, this annual spectacle gets a big fat eyeroll from yours truly everything March 1 rolls around. I have to field questions at work on whether or not I plan on taking the day off, and I eventually get sick of explaining how trout season never really closes, trying to battle back the misinformation.
If it weren’t for my vegetarianism, I would say that these are not the kind of fish that people think twice about putting back. They are hatchery brood, through and through, down to the worn fins and propensity for brightly colored objects. Even the fish caught downstream in my homewaters, the Nianger, give credence to the river’s second name. If it weren’t for their stocking length, you’d think they had lived a hundred seasons.
Aaron J Scott(Quote)
The main purpose of fishing is to avoid people, so no, you would never see me there.
Ray(Quote)
Opening day rocks!
Troutslayer(Quote)
Trout park or not, photos can lie. That’s a deceiving shot, view upstream makes anglers seem closer. They 2′ apart.
Flykuni(Quote)
I was one of “those” kids you are referring to, and I still retain some great memories from fishing this park in my childhood, it’s actually a beautiful place. Would I go fish in this situation now? Hell no…but when you are seven years old just catching fish is a lot of fun. Now I exclusively fly fish, and I prefer those small moutain streams with complete solitude….go figure. So you can stop feeling sorry for kids who fish on opening day, and go ahead and drop the snobbery down a couple notches while you’re at it.
Middle TN Lee(Quote)
Sadly, I really can’t see any kids in the picture (maybe a couple in the lower right hand corner, it’s hard to say).
I think the satellite truck adds a nice touch – The Fishing as Media Event seems oddly appropriate given the circus atmosphere.
One of my first fishing trips was also to a park pond, and I enjoyed the hell out of it , but I don’t know if I would have enjoyed this – there is a hint of combat fishing in the air.
Our advice? Take a kid fishing… someplace quiet.
Tom Chandler(Quote)
Some sneer at those that go about their fishing in ways that are different than ours. For those with lesser equipment they look – yes really look – for the chance to introduce the term redneck into their commentaries. They speak of their favorite waters with reverence flavored with a large dose of superiority. Their tackle is bought with hard earned ego dollars and they never fail to point out the prices paid.
Too often we forget from where we came. Few of us received an Orvis Battenkill for our sixteenth birthday and our first ventures into fly fishing bliss were not to Patagonia. More likely, those first casts were probably made in spots like the one pictured. They were for me. Literally.
I have been there. I have done that. The photo is from the upstream section of Roaring River, and it’s Opening Day. It’s a ritual and it’s not ALL about catching trout. It’s more a celebration that winter is coming to a close and a chance to get back on the river with old friends. LOTS of old friends. Yes, they’ll fill their stringers today, but hey it’s legal and they paid for the right to do so. As a youngster I landed (and strung) my share of those just released stockers before the echoes of the opening siren had ended. It was my introduction to trout fishing and I loved every minute of it.
In the years since, have I evolved to higher plane? I certainly hope not. Yes, my tackle is more expensive and my destinations are slightly more exotic, but I hope to never put down another angler because of it. Thousands of words have been written about the joys of trout fishing and just as certainly, untold numbers of anglers just like those pictured have been a part of the enjoyment. And I’ll bet that a lot of them, once “hooked†and with the passage of time, have spent a buck or two on some fly gear.
Never assume that a guy casting a Rooster Tail to stocker trout is having less fun than you are. Do you think that guy in Patagonia holding the twenty pound brown had more fun that you did with your last bluegill? If you do, I’m sorry. You are missing the joy that got you into this sport in the first place.
52 Trout(Quote)
Be careful when you try to wrap this up neatly in the class wars.
Where, exactly, has anyone suggested that fly fishermen are “better” than those casting a Rooster Tail?
And why, exactly, is suggesting that fishing elbow to elbow – with all the attendant crossed lines and ho-ha associated with too many people in too little space – isn’t a very pleasant experience?
And how exactly has that become a blanket condemnation of those possessing spinning gear?
Tom Chandler(Quote)
This is not, as implied, typical of trout fishing in the midsouth. Opening days in Missouri trout parks are considered by most to be the equivalent of an aquatic bonneroo or lollapalooza – - an event or destination – - rather than an attempt to psychic fulfillment or pastoral idyll. It is, essentially, an inside joke and, as such, it cannot be expected to be understood by outsiders. Missouri and Arkansas offer some of the best trout fishing (often for wild, stream-bred fish) in America and, as a former North Californian, I believe I can more easily find solitude here than in my former home. And by the way, back in the old days, I could have taken a similar photograph at the opener on the Trinity fly water at Lewiston. I have no idea whether that spectacle still exists, but if you substituted digger pines for oaks trees in the picture above, you wouldn’t know the difference. Should we then take that as typical of conditions and personal attributes in Northern California? And further, the wise comments of 52 Trout should be carefully considered. We sometimes see ourselves, as thoughtful flyfishermen, as occupying the top of the piscatorial food chain, with everything else to be either despised or derided. Not so fast my friends, it is only a self-imposed delusion.
Craig(Quote)
That picture above almost made me hurl. I can remember a few opening day trips when I was a kid, but I don’t know if they were that crazy. I think year round fishing does wonders for avoiding these kind of mob scenes, I wrote a few thoughts about this on my blog at http://www.undertheaspens.com/blog/2010/03/year-round-fishing-season-a-beautiful-thing/
MB(Quote)
Eloquently phrased Andrew Phillips. BTW …left OG for Stanford?
Buffalo Country(Quote)
Eloquently phrased Andrew Phillips. BTW …left OG for Stanford?
Buffalo Country(Quote)