ROD AND GUN Threadlines Or Fly Rods?

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30642, 7 January 1965, Page 10

ROD AND GUN Threadlines Or Fly Rods?

(By

JAMES SIERS)

It’s an old argument . . . threadlines or fly rods? Is it fair to discriminate in favour of one? The argument at a meeting of the. North Canterbury Acclimatisation Society on this subject is pretty well a hardy annual. Threadliners say a privileged few have locked up water from the common man whom they say is the average threadliner.

Fly fishermen say that fishing the small back-country lakes and the smaller streams with threadlines would ruin it for both in a very short time.

Since I prefer fly fishing, I would like to see this water, which is ideally suited to the fly, left for fly fishermen.

But I feel that this is not altogether fair for those who fish with the threadline. The threadline “menace” as it has been referred to, is. not as bad as it may seem. Figures from the United States show that fly fishermen have an overwhelming advantage in the number and size of fish they catch. If the work of New Zealand’s former director of the Marine Department’s fisheries laboratory is to be accepted, then in most cases we are not catching even a third of the fish in our streams and rivers.

K. Radway Allen proved in his work on the Horokiwi that unless the various year classes are cropped they die through natural causes. The production cycle is also affected. Young fish cannot compete and survive if there are too many larger fish; larger fish cannot grow bigger because there is not enough food. Threadline fishermen can work to a fishery’s profit. All sports are competitive, including fishing. If a threadline fisherman finds he cannot catch as much as a fly fisherman, or that he ’is catching smaller fish (borne out by observation in New Zealand), he is likely to change his method.

The most irritating aspect about threadline fishermen, as far as fly fishermen are concerned, is that threadliners cover water very

quickly—something a fly fisherman is hard put to tolerate. Although I feel that in spite of this threadline fishermen should be given equal opportunity in most rivers and streams, I would hesitate to remove restrictions in Taupo, and Rotorua, where it has become traditional to fish the rivers and river mouths with the fly. Here, because of superior casting distance, the threadline would have an advantage, and although it would be possible to have a picket fence of either threadlines or fly rods, it would be impossible to mix them. Enough lines are crossed and tangled now! Perhaps what is needed more now than regulations designating water for this or that type of fishing, is a better observation of the code of streamside ethics. Conservation should be treated not from the viewpoint that provision must be made for an adequate supply, but also for an adequate harvest—and threadline fishermen have an equal right to get their share.