FishnChips

Music to my ears: With less than 5% of TransAlta total Alberta power generation capacity derived from the Bow River hydro plants, an alternate peak demand power generation source should be considered. Decommissioning the Bow River Basin’s hydropeaking facilities or modifying their operation protocols would not only enhance the rivers ecosystem and add to the sustainability of threatened and endangered species of fish but contribute to the recreational fishery and Alberta’s economy. Leadership is needed to make a change – now is the time to do so if society is to continue to enjoy the Bow River’s beauty and the fish that depend on a sustainable environment. My (admittedly uneducated) guess is that the dams in place would still be used to buffer stream and river flows to prevent flooding, and some electrical power could still be produced, but this peak demand scenario would be mitigated by an alternative source for power? Or would all the hydro-electric machinery be removed? Would some of the dams be removed too, and if so, what might be proposed? As a slight thread drift, my electrical power shunts on/off so frequently that I am very displeased with the Transalta system. I am re-setting clocks, under-floor heating thermostat clocks, microwave, oven and desktop computers regularly as a result of disruptions to service. As a paying consumer and water conscious sportsman I am disappointed entirely with this state of affairs. Thanks for the link fishteck. While heartened by the report and the sincere effort of the foundation, I am dismayed that Federal and Provincial authorities are ineffective at data gathering, analysis, and regulation of these matters. The alliance between business and supposedly responsible government is simply an affront to common sense and responsibility. Mind, if common sense were common everyone would have it.

speechless

I am going to work on more nymph and streamer presentation. Dry fly is my preference but I need to get deeper to where the fish are as I find the dry action to be quite limited. I am a bit clumsy with the increased mass of streamers and nymphs, I will be working on getting over that. If anyone has some suggestion, I'd be grateful.

Great... Vancouver-based millennials with laptops and lattes looking to advance our ideas as their own. imho they are a perfect example of what is wrong. No subject matter expertise of their own, they are crowd sourcing data to spin a marketing pitch to Tourism Calgary. Sigh... I recommend they set up shop in Canmore on any weekend during the summer... Plenty of twitter and snapchat types wearing their MEC boots with a day pack, cool shades, a mobile phone in one hand and a Beamer's coffee in the other strolling around looking skywards... @Iwasinthemountains... Please... please... please... just stop. Our waters are already overcrowded, overfished, overheated and under cared for.

Thanks, some great references here.

Don, thank you for sharing this letter from Mr Hunt. The time-line is of particular note as from 2005 to 2018 the square root of zip has been done by either provincial or federal authorities. Most distressing indeed. I have worked for three different nations' defence departments and I know how stupid big government can be. This is more proof, not that we needed it. As a side discussion to this matter is this issue that the Federal gov't won't involve itself with species deemed to be exotic, such as the Brook and Brown Trout resident in the Bow River and her tributaries. The Feds' attitude is ridiculous. The Bow River flows damn near halfway across this country, changing name and characteristics in the process. Yes, the Brown and Brook species were introduced to AB years ago with the best of intentions to enhance sport fishery. It was a mistake from the purist's point of view. We have goofy hybridization all over the place. (In a study done on Bill Griffiths Creek, east of Canmore, AB a few years ago, the team harvested a Brook/Bull hybrid. It was the only one they thought they found in their electrofishing exercise, and they killed it to examine it). I doubt very much that on the basis of a single perceived example of hybridization between the exotic Brook and the native Bull that the Feds will become involved. Short of the extreme solution proffered above by Albertatrout using rotenone to kill everything and starting back from square one with a genetically pure stock and preventing any type of fishing for a few years until populations gain traction, there doesn't seem to be a solution. The Bull trout is the Native and symbolic fish of the Province of Alberta. It is distinct and special. It deserves protection. By everyone and before it's too late. The government can and does do "dumb stuff", it happens for a huge variety of complex and cascading reasons. Usually one well-meant decision ends up creating another set of previously unforeseen problems to solve. One of the other challenges is that there are usually several options deemed possible by the interested party and a kind of option paralysis sets in... (I see this with my beloved when a waiter sets a menu in front of her at a restaurant! LOL, it is a very common human trait). The Bull Trout is already protected in AB, but it is capable of hybridization with at least one of the two known exotics. I wonder if the Feds might be provoked into getting off their duffs and getting involved? What will it take? How can we ensure they even know about the problem? I have zero faith in either the Prov or Fed fisheries authorities. They are two engaged and well-meaning parties engaged in tug of war in a zero-sum game. Neither side willing to budge from their separate and differing agendas. This is a legacy headed for disaster.

Do fish feel pain when hooked? I feel pain when I read threads like this one. I see a great deal of quite well informed and expressed opinion on this topic. It is commendable that our fishing community seeks to express itself. I certainly learn a lot and it does much to shape my personal opinion. I also observe evidence of apathy, fractured consensus, ambiguous data, (our own minister Shannon Phillips declined to follow the recommendation of our own provincial biologists in Spring 2018 [WTF?]), interpretive bias and selective fact presentation which does not reveal the complete set of cascading events and distorts the complicated interactions. For example, who actually controls Bow Flow on a day to day basis? Is it in fact TransAlta or the Province? Whom can we trust to tell us the truth? This further complicates matters. Many fine minds and intelligent people from the academy of fine ideas (Fed/ Prov government and academia) and plain old smart folks who know their rivers, their territory and can put pen to paper from Roderick Haig-Brown in BC, Tom McGuane in Montana, Andy Russell to Kevin van Tighem in AB. Just these few writers have between them more than a century’s worth of intelligent prose dedicated to educating even the most poorly educated (like me) fisherfolks on the topic of conservation. Why are we still so $£%&ed up over it? In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values. This discomfort is triggered by a situation in which a person’s belief clashes with new evidence perceived by that person. When confronted with facts that contradict personal beliefs, ideals, and values, people will find a way to resolve the contradiction in order to reduce their discomfort… (I excerpted this off the web). Call it, if you will, skating on thin ice. I saw this cognitive dissonance phenomenon 90 minutes ago on the Town Pond in my foothills town. The pond is not officially open as it has not met the Town’s published criteria for safety. There is a sign prominently displayed. Yet Mothers and Fathers with supposedly beloved children are lacing up to skate and ignoring the signs. You have facts opposed by a mind-set which is creating a risk and threat to their own children. A so-called Professional Guide behaving as quoted above to the TUC Creel Survey? Not so hard when you begin to look at the complexities of the human mind. A disgrace to civilization. I see in this forum thread a link to the Bow River Trout something or other… (sigh). Just look at all the different organizations struggling to have their point of view heard. Federal, Provincial, Alberta Environment, Alberta Conservation, Bow River Trout Something or other, TUC – Calgary and Upper Bow Chapters… (isn’t it the same river?), the Guides, the fishing stores, the pathetic amateur drift boat owner guiding on a river (to un-informed clients) he doesn’t know because it looks good on youtube.com… (that started this past season in my area). It’s a higgledy-piggledy mess. It reminds me of the final scene in David Lean’s magnificent film Lawrence of Arabia. Ladies and Gentlemen we have a huge problem. We need murderous, stunning truthfulness. All topics, all areas and all the time. We need a single competent authority and a unified, informed and standardized approach. The utility of the internet is at our disposal. The solution will have to be in the form of tough love. “No skating today kids, the pond is not safe” would be music to my ears.

Delray, For your next trip you might consider Air Canada from LHR to YYC return. I share your dislike of flying - economy class is a dreadful, thinly disguised medieval torture with whomever one flies with. Air Transat also offers a once per week service from LGW to Calgary. A family member used this service recently and found it satisfactory. Westjet operates this route as well, and though it is a Calgary based company and I have many friends working there, their trans-Atlantic service is relatively new and the aircraft type is the now aged B-767, and Westjet is operating old Qantas airframes with associated reliability issues. I missed this whole thread until today... but I am sitting in Southwest London as I type... I’ll send a PM at a later date with a few questions if you don’t mind. Cheers and tight lines.

Excellent!

I certainly agree, however, I have a concern regarding some of the stocking program. I realize we all have more compelling stories in our lives, and precious time spent on long narratives has gone by the wayside with the introduction of our modern social media like Snapchat, Twitter etcetera, but since I like my sport so much I'll tell the story. Personally, I prefer fishing for wild trout in the mountains. It is pretty, there's not too many folks about (though that has changed drastically in the past two years), and the trout are wily. For better or worse, they are mostly exotic Browns left over from that mythological "accidental/forced" stocking from early in the 20th century when a conservation stocking truck broke down and the CO dumped the trout into the Upper Bow. We have a few Brook Trout around in some sections, a few Bull Trout as well but it's pretty skinny fishing compared to the Blue Ribbon section. A couple of years ago, I fished Mt Lorette Ponds with an out of province guest and we had a nice day, catching and releasing those eager tame stockers. There were several hundred fish in the main pond with the railing around it. Exactly 7 days later I took my small family there for the day to continue our daughter's fishing education and there wasn't a single fish left! I was disappointed and so was the family. There was one dead trout on the bottom of the main pond. This year my observation is related to stocking reports from mywildalberta.ca for Mt Lorette Ponds. I retired last spring and wanted to put a bit more strategy into my occasional visits and I thought I may have learned something about the need to hit Mt. Lorette Ponds fairly soon after stocking... My wife likes to fish there, it's pretty and the fishing easy. We have, on one occasion, departed the ponds due to "new Canadians" arriving en-masse, standing shoulder to shoulder with us, and hauling trout out of the pond into buckets which were filled well beyond the two fish per person limit stated on the posted sign. It was a three-ring circus and pretty ugly. So, this year I checked the stocking reports regularly, but to no avail. As Taco states in his previous post, and as I learned from trial and error, the posting on the internet of stocking follows well behind the actual stocking date to be of any practical use. (I believe this is purposeful and a good idea, but...) This was my experience during the early part of the summer of 2018: By examining last years' (2017) reports and making an educated guess taking into consideration the late arrival of Spring to the Eastern Slopes, I took my bride to Mt Lorette Ponds to fish on days which seemed likely. On each of three (3) occasions we arrived within 7 days of the posted stocking date (though this date was not known on the day we arrived there). On each occasion the Mt Lorette Ponds (all 4 of them) were entirely devoid of fish. Nada. Zilch. Zip. Not even a dead one on the bottom (a common enough site in previous years). 3 x 80 minutes of driving (round trip from home) = 4 hours of driving wasted to find entirely empty ponds. What is astonishing is that the two latter stockings were purportedly of 1,000 fish! They had completely vanished in periods ranging from 5 to 7 calendar days! In the worst case, that is a harvest rate of 200 fish per day. In theory, if each fisher-person only takes the prescribed limit, that is 100 anglers per day, steadily for 5 days... the odds of this consistency are, to a reasonable mind, not likely. I did not track the truck - it is impossible based on the delay between actual stocking and the website posting. By the time the info is posted by Wild Alberta, all the fish are gone. Where they hell do they go? How are people finding out when the stocking takes place to the point where they are clearly able to stalk the truck... I mentioned this phenomenon to the nice CO who checked my license a few weeks ago... the simple enough arithmetic seemed to challenge him, (perhaps he was tired), and he theorized that the pond is just seeing heavy fishing pressure. I respectfully disagree. Something is rotten in Denmark, to quote the Bard. Thoughts Ladies and Gentlemen?

I've noticed an increased number of wasps these past couple of years in the Bow Valley. Was also out in South Kootenay Lake area two weeks ago - wasps everywhere, all the time! They alight on our sandwiches while we're holding them!

Fished Threepoint Creek yesterday near Millarville. At noon the water temp was 18.5 Celcius, about 65 F. Water dirty, vis about 3 feet. One small Cuttie.

Ahem... indeed; thanks.

This is specious logic.

Germany was the origin of introduction of Brown Trout species to North America I believe. Bruin refers to bears... perhaps the write is mis-pronouncing 'Brown' like a Scotsman...? No matter... I do wish we could agree to speak The Queen's English!

A very, very well written article.