QUALITY OR QUANTITY?

Press, 24 February 1979, Page 16

QUALITY OR QUANTITY?

FISHinG-with Tony ORMAN

One day last autumn, while I was fishing Lake Hawea, the action was so fast that I began to return good-sized trout to the water one after another. I kept four fish, all rainbows and all in the 41b bracket.

Those four trout, and the released fish, were taken on deeply fished nymphs. This is the kind of fishing you do not forget, but even allowing for the exceptional quantity of trout I landed that day, I soon got pretty tired of it.

Eventually, I changed my sinking fly line for a floater, and took to fishing a small stream with a dry fly, I landed one good fish, hooked a couple of scrappy teninchers, and found myself immeasurably more satisfied than with the earlier bag of fish from the lake shore.

Somehow, the fun in catching trout on a floating fly was much greater than on the deeply sunken nymph. All fly anglers will appreciate this. Wet fly fishing is often difficult and it requires sensitivity and alertness to detect a take in calm water. The dry fly is easier in that, providing your presentation is adequate, you the fly

sucked under. The rest is up to you. While the skill to dry fly fishing can be overrated, for sheer kicks, fishing the floating fly is tops. It has an intangible quality about it. 1 think many trout fishermen prefer quality to quantity. Sure, we all like to catch fish — and plenty of them. But one trout, depending on circumstances, can give as much fun as half a dozen other fish. It is not really important to catch fish. The fun is in trying to

catch them. Some of the most memorable of fish I have caught have been those in the back-country streams. It might be the wilderness surroundings, and the clear wild rivers, but these trout up-country do fight and are of fine quality. The circumstances of the usual spotting of trout, the stalking, the cast, and then the fight of a wild, superblyconditioned fish, make the adherents of this mountain fishing avid for more. I often drive for an

hour or more to catch perhaps one or two quality trout from a backcountry river, when I might be able to get two trout from a stream much closer. Why? I believe it is the distinctive fascination of this type of angling. Which brings us to the point of trout stocking. Should we aim for quality or quantity? A lake or stream is like a farm. It has only so much trout food; like the farmer, we should gear the trout population to the carrying capacity. Overstep the carrying capacity, and while we may have many trout they will probably be small and runty. What angler would deny that he would rather catch one three pound trout than half a dozen lean, twelveinchers. This the problem that

has confronted fisheries officers throughout the world. In many cases it might be advisable to concentrate on stream improvement rather than liberations of vast numbers of fry and fingerlings. Many of our waters are badly in need of improvement as trout habitat. Pollution by industrial wastes and poisoning is just one angle. Watershed protection to arrest erosion, w’hich will eventually destroy holding pools, and improvement of the stream with judiciously built groynes, small natural weirs, and even the scooping out of shingled holes, can have considerable merit. Keep your fish population to the carrying capacity of the stream or lake and you will surely have quality trout fishing.