President's Journal July 2006
Saturday, 01 July 2006, 11:14 p.m. CDT
Stream Ettiquette
This is a tricky subject where there is not always a right answer, but it has been bugging me for a while now, so I am going to open the proverbial can of worms.
Recently, I was haphazardly "playing guide" on Verdigre creek for one of our members, showing him around, pointing out pools where fish held, and and generally not doing a very good job of getting him into fish. We passed a couple (guy and girlfriend) where the guy was teaching his girlfriend how to fly fish. The facts are that Verdigre is always a tight-quarters stream, where errant casts and sloppy backcasts will leave you spending 20 times more time picking flies out of bushes than out of fishs' mouths. I couldn't imagine teaching a novice to fish there, especially in the summer when the vegetation is high. It seems like such a good way to discourage someone for life.
Anyway, we passed the couple, moving upstream past them a couple hundred feet to point out the next pool where fish tend to hold. I pointed out the pool, and Jeff asked if we were going to fish it. A reasonable question since we generally go fishing to catch some fish, or spend time trying. I glanced in the direction of the couple moving upstream and said I'd prefer to leave the pool to them. Jeff asked what the proper stream ettiquette was in such a situation. I didn't have a great answer, kind of bumbled around, and said I guessed it kind of depends on how bad you need to try to catch a fish just then.
In truth, I had spent maybe 45 minutes on that pool the day before (being a weekday, I was alone on the stream), swapping fly after fly, until my patch was loaded, and never got a fish to take. They were eating something, but it was nothing like what I offered. Obviously. So the next day with Jeff, I suspected that if we jumped in ahead of them, we'd definitely be blocking them for who-knows-how-long, and again, it's public water and public land that everyone has the right to fish, but I knew other pools we could fish, I hoped the guy and his girlfriend could have a good experience there, and besides, it was getting close to lunchtime and I was hearing those burgers sizzling on the charcoal grill of my mind. So we walked away and fixed lunch at the campground.
The time before up on Verdigre, there wasn't a crowd of people (maybe 5 or 6 trucks), but there was a pair from Omaha who landed, suited up, and started fishing the bridge pool and the next pool upstream. The logical places to start. We were there when they arrived at about 10, and around 2, they were still there on those same 2 pools. What they didn't know, but we did since we had walked around for several hours searching for rises, was that for some quirky reason, apprently the only place on that mile-long stretch of stream where fish were taking flies was those 2 pools. Before they arrived, I had fished the upper pool, caught a couple of small fish, put the rest down, and moved on to see what else was happening on the stream. Upstream of the hatchery, 2 more guys had set up lawnchairs and a cooler, with 6 rods with bobbers floating in the underwater weeds, spaced evenly along the 60ft pool.
Finding dead-quiet everywhere else on the stream, I looped back around to the pools a few times in those 4 hours, and each time those 2 guys were there, usually standing in the water changing flies. I don't understand it, but those 2 pools were the only place you could see a fish, let alone see it work for food. Finally, I asked one of those guys if he had caught all the fish out of that pool yet, and he replied that he'd tried everything and caught maybe one. Then he turned back to tie on the next fly.
We left the area, tried a new spot, and it all worked out OK, since that new spot was the source of the one big brown I wrote about last month.
So were those 2 guys wrong to sit on the same 2 pools for 4 hours, when they could see a half-dozen other fishermen milling about? Was I wrong to think that if they hadn't caught more than one fish in a couple of hours, they could pretty reasonably conclude it was time to try somewhere else and give someone else a shot at the pool? Should Jeff and I have fished that pool ahead of the couple? Were the lawn-chair guys wrong to "claim" the pool with 6 rods (Yes, apparently it's illegal.) Everybody has to make his or her own decision on this matter, but I guess I think it's good to try to err on the side of courteousness. Unless of course, you've really got an unusual itch that just has to be scratched. This time. Needless to say, if we all have the itch-that-needs-to-be-scratched all the time, then we'll all end up acting like selfish jerks, and fishing life is going to be hell in an increasingly populated world.
Anyway, it can help your perspective on courtesy to catch a few fish early in the day, and to do that, it can help to be there first. Or a day early, on a weekday. Or during hunting season, when the sportsmen are shooting things (on Verdigre, wear orange during hunting season.) Verdigre creek is a small stream, and it doesn't take many guys sitting on holes to "clog up" the stream. That's why I'd like to see the club try to help NGPC develop more holding habitat on the stream, because there are long stretches of the stream that seem barren of fishing opportunities, at least for fly fishermen. We could change that. In the meantime, a little consideration can go a long way.