to seep through the hemlocks, but Roger and Pierre had been fishing for almost two hours. Roger used a white telescopic fishing pole, the kind that river anglers deploy in France. There’s no casting involved. You just extend the rod as far as you need to in order to drop your line and baited hook into a spot where the fish are likely to be. Roger wore boots but he had little interest in wading into the creek. He stood on a boulder beneath a large tree, extended his right arm and, still as a statue, held his rod in place until he felt a tug on the line. He slipped the trout he caught into a wicker creel on a shoulder sling.
Pierre wore a flannel shirt and rubber hip boots, and he fished with a spinning rod and a small brass lure shaped like a willow leaf. When he saw me, he grinned broadly and opened his creel – 13 killed, few more than 6 or 7 inches long, several of them wild brown trout.
“You’re lucky you don’t get arrested,” I half-joked.
Most of Pierre’s trout were probably under the minimum size required for harvest by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He did not care about this.
“The smaller the sweeter,” said the chef in his French accent. “Oh, yeah, the little ones taste the best.”
“Yeah, and you have to kill twice as many to make a meal.”
He grumbled at my streamside moralizing and walked away, and, tell you the truth, I don’t blame him. The last thing he wanted on a carefree morning of fishing was a lecture on fishing ethics. There were several men along the river that day, and just about all were taking full creels of trout, both wild and stocked. The whole scene seemed greedy and depressingly short-sighted to me, and it threw me completely out of the mood for fishing. As a lover of rivers, I had learned enough about trout habitat to recognize what was happening that day: It was the purging of Father’s Day Creek.
From what I could tell, judging from Pierre’s and Roger’s creels and what I saw of other catches, about a third of the fish taken were the small brown trout born in the stream. The other two-thirds were larger, colorless, hatchery-raised rainbow trout. There’s a huge difference. The wild browns were natives, and vital to the stream’s sustainability; such fish should almost never be harvested from streams in the heavily populated Eastern states. The stocked rainbows, on the other hand, were just temporary visitors, placed in the stream for two reasons – to provide sport for anglers, and supper for their families.
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania stocks more than three million adult trout annually in more than 700 rivers, mostly the old waterways considered unfit for a year-round wild trout population. But the stocking crews sometimes put hatchery trout in waters, like Father’s Day Creek, that are good enough for wild trout to inhabit all year. This is a huge mistake. It’s like putting paroled inmates in a nursery school. The rainbows compete for habitat and for food; they bring chaos to a delicately balanced ecosystem and stress the wild brown trout. It’s bad fisheries science, a concession to the fish-killers who use baited hooks and who want to catch stocked trout as conveniently and as quickly as possible – preferably in the same place their fathers took them when they were kids. They care more about maintaning their annual rituals and going home with full creels than about preserving a wild trout habitat, and the fisheries managers are pressured to accommodate that demand.
Stocking is an old tradition in the Eastern states. It is a widely accepted practice, and fisheries managers are caught between two forces – people, like me, who think wild trout streams ought to be left alone and the people who could care less about scientific arguments and look forward to fishing for trout in the usual spots every spring. I have always found it remarkable, and regrettable, that the men and boys who came out to fish during what they considered “trout season” did not care to enjoy the experience but for one day or one week all year long, nor did they care to know more about the rivers they fished. They had come to expect things to always be a certain way, even in nature, no matter how contrived the experience. Father’s Day Creek was, to the local guys, just an easy-to-access local river loaded with trout from the hatchery trucks. They expected the state to provide them with fish to catch, over a couple of weeks in April, and maybe May, and then they moved on to other activities. They could not imagine another reason to visit the river, or to even give it much thought; to them, the creek was simply a seasonal conveyer of easily harvested protein.
I’ve reached a point where I think the stocking should just stop in any stream that can hold wild trout. But, of course, such a decision would likely cause a revolt among the nation’s two-week trout anglers. I recognize that some streams are just too degraded, or get too warm in summer, to sustain wild trout. The state stocks those waters with trout so that adults and children can have a pleasant experience. Beyond providing that temporary recreation, however, I don’t see what good it does. I would rather see states curtail their stocking and put time and money into stream restoration efforts, to improve water quality and create more habitat for trout and other wildlife.
I make no apology for sounding like an elitist in this regard. Fishing is not only about catching. It’s about caring for the natural world around you, and having healthy waters for future generations.
Now and then, whenever I encountered a bait angler who seemed open to the conversation, I would explain some of my reasoning and talk about the challenges of catching wild trout all year in good waters, and how that ideal required the angler to stop fishing with bait and to release what’s caught. Instead of expecting the state to keep stocking degraded rivers with trout from a hatchery – a costly process that does nothing for the environment – we should work toward getting streams back to their historic best. Do that, and we could fish for trout every month of the year, and have cleaner waters flowing toward our reservoirs, lakes and bays. We might even reach a place where, with enough restored rivers, anglers who wanted to catch for their supper might be able to keep a couple of stream-bred trout. But until we do more to bring back more miles of healthy waters, we’re just financing and managing a cooked-up, half-baked system – stocking fish in rivers in spring to satisfy some seasonal craving for recreational fishing. It no longer makes sense.
That was my streamside rap, delivered with friendly discretion whenever it seemed appropriate. I tried to avoid making it sound like a lecture. I don’t know if I ever convinced a single angler to change his ways – to give up bait for artificial lures or flies, to leave his creel at home as a decorative vessel for dried flowers, and to practice catch-and-release fishing – but I tried a few times. I tried it with Pierre on Father’s Day Creek, but he was closer to my father and father-in-law in age and generational experience. He was a successful gardener who enjoyed harvesting the fruits of his labors, a chef who, like my father-in-law, took pride in preparing and serving good meals. The trout that he caught in Father’s Day Creek, whether wild or stocked, were part of his hunter-gatherer mindset, and as long as the state put trout in the river for the taking, Pierre would take them. And he would serve them, if you please, panned-fried in butter, with red potatoes and asparagus, and a glass of chablis.
The invasion of the hatchery-born rainbows was harmful to Father’s Day Creek. Dozens of fishermen, armed with lures and worms and little balls of Velveeta, came to its banks and caught them all in a matter of weeks. But here’s the thing: Like Pierre and Roger, these anglers made no distinction between the hatchery rainbows and the wild brown trout. They caught everything and took it all, stripping away the population of wild trout whose presence made the river so special. In 1993, I concluded sadly that, without protection by the Commonwealth, the creek would never be restored to its historic best. It would always be a marginal trout stream. It wasn’t sewage or erosion that harmed the river. It was short-sighted fisheries management and an indiscriminate harvest.
– 6:15 am
I usually fished the creek on weekends, and always made a point of being there on Father’s Day. I prepared by following the same fastidious ritual each time. I parked my car on a grassy spot near the old, one-lane bridge, pleased that no one else had the same idea. I stood outside the car and assembled my two-piece, 4-weight Scott rod and attached the Pfleuger reel. I ran the fly line through the eyes of the rod and checked the last section of the leader, the tippet, to see if it needed to be replaced or lengthened, or at least