brian dunigan
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Hmm – reading between the lines, I think that “total hacker” is a new category for my casts…
It was windy that day!
I saw you mentioned polarized shades – earlier this year I got a pair of Action Optics Fishbones and I LOVE them.
To some extent, the skipjack are always in the canal – the numbers just increase when it turns cold. In truth, I think the stripers on the Cumberland follow the threadfin and gizzard shad more than the skipjack.
Regardless, the skipjack are fun to fish for in their own right.
Whenever I have tried to swing nymphs, streamers, or pretty much anything, I’m terrible about breaking fish off. With dead-drift nymphing, I get so used to hooksets on a little slack line that when a trout hits a tight line at the bottom of the swing, I react with way too much force. I need to work on my gentle strip strike, I guess. It can be tough sometimes, coming from a background of plastic worm fishing for bass…
bd
TU does a lot of good work, and I just hope the organization doesn’t shoot itself in the foot trying to play hardball politics.
The jury’s still out on whether I’ll make it up there to the Cumberland this weekend with you and Mike.
It’s hard to comment with much insight on an issue I haven’t been following up to now, but it certainly sounds like bad politics. By yanking the charter, it’s unlikely that TU will encourage more conservation. It’s also tough to do a lot of new membership recruiting without already having strong presence in the state. How do you get new people to come to a meeting for a non-existent charter?
Finally, I wonder how this will affect TU’s ability to push important environmental litigation in that area of the country. TU has long been a central force in resisting dam building, water use issues, and other problems that hurt anadromous fisheries. Does TU’s charter revocation impact its standing to do so in the future? It would be awful for TU to lose its traction in an area like Washington, which is so central to U.S. fishery management of Pacific salmon and steelhead.
Besides, without sport fishermen, all you have left is commercial fishing and hog-wild native netting. Those groups haven’t ever been very concerned with preserving wild fish stocks. If TU is serious about conservation, it should take responsibility for educating its membership accordingly – rather than just taking all its marbles and going back East.
I guess my biggest gripe with TU is that too many members think it is a club for fly fishing, not cold water fisheries conservation. If you want a fly fishing club, fine, but change the name and the charter. The local Cumberland Chapter’s meeting last month featured a presentation on flyfishing in the Gulf for redfish. Sounds fun, but what does it have to do with trout, cold water, or conservation in general? If you have enough fly fishermen get together, talking about fly fishing, and bashing spin fishermen and “bait chunkers” all day long, people eventually get the feeling you care less about conservation and more about fly fishing snobbery.
This has turned into a general rant, I guess, but I think TU would better advance its overall conservation goals by doing more outreach to non-flyfishermen. I cared strongly about conservation decades before I ever picked up a long rod, and many others do too.
You know what I like best about the picture at the top of this thread? Look at those gloves. That’s some cold weather gear.
Weren’t we talking about how it was almost warm enough to fish in shorts by the end of the day last weekend? 🙂
bd
