01-23-2005, 10:14 PM
I'm not going to say the DWR is always right, but sometimes you have to play with the cards that you are dealt. Look at Yuba right now. We don't have a hatchery that produces perch or walleye. We do have hatcheries that produce trout. The DWR has put perch back in Yuba. (At a pretty high price per fish) They have put tight restrictions on the perch for several years in an attempt to stave off the crash of the perch, and now prohibit the possession of perch until they can rebound. Even catching the perch this time of year can kill them. In the mean time they have put trout in Yuba to give someone something to catch while the perch and walleyes recover.
It is marginal trout water in many respects. It can get too warm. It is very turbid. It has little or no spawning habitat or options for spawning trout. But it is producing 20 inch trout. It will produce 24 to 28 inch trout this year if they don't all get harvested. This is after only a year and a half of water being back in Yuba. The trout fishery will be short lived though. So enjoy it while it lasts. The perch will be back next year. There will still be a very limited harvest allowed, if any. But the seeds have been sown. There will be enough perch to sustain the population by next year. And then the walleye will come back, and that will be the end of the trout fishery, unless the DWR decides to plant trout big enough to avoid being forage for the walleyes.
Utah has to deal with reservoirs mostly. We don't have a lot of lakes. We don't have plentiful rains in the summer. We have runoff in good years, and droughts quite often. If we had more lakes, and more consistant water levels we could have more diversity in a lot of our waters. We don't have what it takes to make every water what we would like, so we make do with what we have.
I can think of only one or two bodies of water within 2 hours of my house that are over a couple dozen acres in size that contain only trout. The rest are either very small, or they have at least one warmwater specie in them. It seems to me that for a state that caters to trout, and trout fishermen, we've got more waters that have some trout and some warmwater species, rather than those that have only trout.
Fishrmn
It is marginal trout water in many respects. It can get too warm. It is very turbid. It has little or no spawning habitat or options for spawning trout. But it is producing 20 inch trout. It will produce 24 to 28 inch trout this year if they don't all get harvested. This is after only a year and a half of water being back in Yuba. The trout fishery will be short lived though. So enjoy it while it lasts. The perch will be back next year. There will still be a very limited harvest allowed, if any. But the seeds have been sown. There will be enough perch to sustain the population by next year. And then the walleye will come back, and that will be the end of the trout fishery, unless the DWR decides to plant trout big enough to avoid being forage for the walleyes.
Utah has to deal with reservoirs mostly. We don't have a lot of lakes. We don't have plentiful rains in the summer. We have runoff in good years, and droughts quite often. If we had more lakes, and more consistant water levels we could have more diversity in a lot of our waters. We don't have what it takes to make every water what we would like, so we make do with what we have.
I can think of only one or two bodies of water within 2 hours of my house that are over a couple dozen acres in size that contain only trout. The rest are either very small, or they have at least one warmwater specie in them. It seems to me that for a state that caters to trout, and trout fishermen, we've got more waters that have some trout and some warmwater species, rather than those that have only trout.
Fishrmn