Montana Fisheries Letter

GrtLksMarlin

GrtLksMarlin

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I like how right off the bat on page 3 they note "climate change" as being one of the challenges facing the fishery.

B.E.F.
 
dean_mt

dean_mt

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Thanks man, I really enjoy the annual fisheries report from our FWP. I'm one that thinks these guys and gals do a lot of really excellent work and don't get enough credit.
 
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jjack

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Very slick guidebook, I like it a lot
 
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livingston

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dean_mt said:
Thanks man, I really enjoy the annual fisheries report from our FWP. I'm one that thinks these guys and gals do a lot of really excellent work and don't get enough credit.
Click to expand...
They do, but they are really stuck up on some things like Region 3 trying to get bows out of the Shields. Blocking the river off to migrating browns and bows to the majority of the stream was done without debate. The upper drainage always has had lots of cutts, and the lower has been bows and nice browns with a few cutties. The effort to eliminate the bows is crazy as most in there are fall spawners and the old Kamloops strain that once escaped from ponds anyway (very cool steelhead like fish).

If they want to get rid of brookies in the headwaters have at it...but it won't work as most EVERY trickle has them. They packed their gear into a stream I fishing off the Crazys one day and shocked it, in the PM they came out and reported no brookies. Except we had been pounding 11 inchers all day along with cutts. So we just shut up. If they want pure YCTs they need to kill a complete tributary drainage and block that off.

The key to having cutts is having water in the streams, the spawning streams. When we have lots of snow the creeks run all summer and now after high water years we have cutts all the way down to Big Timber and below. When it is dry we have them upstream only in numbers.

They do a lot of shocking on the Stone each year, and somehow decided that 20 inch browns are rare, like a couple per mile which is hardly the case. Then when they got some public pressure they reopened the upper Yellowstone to bait and half the fish on stringers are cutts now.

The biologists I know are all good guys who care about their work, but they really don't have a good handle on the rivers compared to the guys who are on the water every day. Perhaps it is direction from the top...political appointees etc.
 
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mt_flyfisher

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The link doesn't work for me either. I would love to read the report, but I am also unable to locate it on the FWP website, or by doing an Internet search.

I had wondered how they were going to eliminate all of the brookies, rainbows and browns (yes, there are some big browns in there too, and way up into the Crazies) from the Shields when I heard about this last summer. Also, it seems that keeping the spawning Browns out of the Shields in the fall would be a negative for Yellowstone's brown population.

John
 
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