Would You Be In Favour Of Closing The Bow River, Above 22X From Oct 1 - Dec 31

[bowbonehead]

At least we can agree on something. I've also been advocating this for years, and have personally restricted my fishing to 22X and down from Oct1 and on thru to january...

 

Hear Hear, and the Highwood confluence in the spring Pre-Spawn

[Hawgstoppah]

Hear Hear, and the Highwood confluence in the spring Pre-Spawn

 

I agree. I will admit that I do spend some time down there (though not in the last 6-7 years). But I do think a closure would be good for that area, but not just restricted to the confluence. Rainbows are stacked in deeper wintering water for at least 2 miles upstream - cottonwood golf course and down for example, and they are stacked also dow to mac. I am not in favour of a closure that will allow people to feel even better about fishing right up to the confluence, lifting out their lines for 5 minutes, floating past confluence fishers and snubbing their noses at them, and then letting their lines back in at the end of the hole there. Those people are the pot calling the kettle black in all honesty, they are fishing over the same pre spawn fish 300 yards downriver as those who are at the confluence. The entire closure should encompass Police to Mac.. Apr 1 to June 16, if implemented. It would significantly help the fishery, IMHO.

[Conor]

More fry does not necessarily equal more catchable trout. Seems a lot of people in this thread don't understand that, and that is likely because they are not biologists. Leave opinions on specific regulations decisions to the professionals. We as a group are not qualified to discuss it.

There are things we can do, though...

Two of the best points in this thread, IMO, were Dave's, "If we make decisions that aren't based on data, we may be subject to decisions not based on data," and Max's, "If we wait until the pops are impacted to make decisions, it may be too late." Obviously I paraphrased both those points, so feel free to correct me if I missed the gist.

There is a temporal conflict between those two points that I see one good solution to. Funding and research.

Here are the things we could do to protect our river.

-Get out and vote in every election. Consider how your ballot impacts the funding our fisheries are allocated.

-Let your politicians know your stance and the level of value you place on our fisheries.

-Grassroots biology. Not of complete value to our Bios or fisheries, but it does have some.

On the last point, and touching on one of Don's points, maybe a volunteer effort to visually survey the redds in the City would be of value to SRD. And/or volunteer catch per effort logs. Perhaps one person from each concerned group (say FFC, TU, etc) could be assigned to meet and discuss, then approach our regulators for their opinions. Between us, SRD, and some planning and organization, we may be able to put more real data behind regulation decisions, and possibly catch population problems before it is too late to correct them.

[DaveJensen]

There's an annual redd count on the RDR. The issue is consistency of the eyes looking at what counts as a redd and where those eyes are looking. There needs be a consistent set of eyes, and I'm not sure you get that with sporadic volunteerism. NOT knocking the idea, but how to get that consistency? TU bio? DFO (sorry, laughing from New Zealand on that one). It would have to be a 20 year vision as well, otherwise, no point to begin. Lovely idea. Just a 'how' needs be answered. Oh, and of course, with any volunteer thing, liability comes to the forefront too. People in or near water in boats. Insurance companies love that combo (the only thing missing would be a float plane or chopper - more humor). Cheers from windy, rainy-ville

[Guest 420FLYFISHIN]

if i were to do a redd count i would hire a helicopter and do a fly over with a high res video and hope for the best. Then have multiple eyes check the video with a counter then average the counts.

[Myth1228]

I'm being facetious here, of course, but it is wise to be careful what you wish for.

 

Agreed. We're going through the same thing in the hunting community now - people lobbying to have opportunity reduced. I'm not going to pretend to have any idea about the waters in question, but people need to realize then when our hunting/fishing opportunities are reduced or taken away, they rarely ever come back. Once this section is closed, it will be on to the next one, and so on, and so forth.

[Conor]

I'm sure DFO would lend a chopper and a few bios out for a couple days every year for the next 20 years.

 

I had something more low tech in mind. Setting up beats of bank to walk and limit observations to a certain distance. It would not be critical to count all the redds; the focus would be on consistency so any trends would be observable (and defendable) over the years. I'm not sure how important the observers would be, because even with the same people year after year, there would be a bias developed as their search images improved.

[bcubed]

Funny, no issue with volunteering to float the elbow to count redds this fall....