Show All » 2006 » Archives
Sunday, December 10, 2006OSR #3-2006 Merry Christmas
As the Holidays approach, it is certainly appropriate to wish you a great holiday season. However, from me, in my anti politically correct temperament, I wish you a very Merry Christmas. I hope 2007 will bring you happiness and a bountiful year of fishing adventure.
Speaking of fishing adventure, the 2007 season is only about four months away. In the next few months, what happens out in the lake from a weather standpoint will have a major impact on fishing for years to come. Mild temperatures will result in warmer water and that helps the survival of baitfish such as the alewife. A bumper crop of alewives would suit me just fine and I am sure Mr. Chinook would smile smartly as he thunders into that balled up school of tasty little fish. The longer the lake stays on the warm side, the better it is for the alewife to prepare for the cold winter weather that will surely arrive, sooner or later. Nature can be kind or she can be brutal, usually we get a dose of both.
Recently, I reported that there were millions of naturally spawned Chinooks swimming in the Salmon River. I have noticed comments from some that these natural fish will add big numbers to the Chinook population. Not so fast I say, since we do not know for certain just how many naturals make it to adult hood. Perhaps there are many and perhaps there are only a few. To obtain a definitive answer we need to count wild fish or stocked fish, one or the other. In the future we may develop technology to tell the difference between the two; however, today that technology is definitely in the embryonic stages.
At present the only scientific way to determine valid numbers, is to fin clip the recently born fish and count them when they return to the tributary streams as adults. Until you do this, it doesn’t matter how many wild fish you think there are, it only matters if you somehow scientifically arrive at their numbers. It is impossible to count wild fish, however, technology exists that would allow us to automatically fin clip thousands of stocked fish. This would provide a huge amount of data that would allow fishery managers to project scientifically valid results. Then and only then will we know the effects of wild fish production.
By the way, that technology now exists in the form of a state of the art fish marking system which will cost about 6 to 7 hundred thousand smakaroos. It would be money well spent, especially, when you consider the wasteful pork barrel projects that our country endures.
NYS is hoping to purchase such a system which can be used to the benefit of all types of angling pleasures not just those of the Chinook salmon. If we get this device the entire NYS angling community wins, and we all know how nice it is to win.
Posted By: Capn Gerry Bresadola @ 4:48:29 AM
