The average stocked trout goes to about a half pound in Pennsylvania. You really don't need a heavy line in the first place. When you see low, slow waters the fish are line shy. When it's high and cloudy, there's not as much of an issue.
You're looking at 50 plus years of having a single, statewide opening day in mid-April. That means just about everyone who is out there trout fishing now has never known anything else.
We kind of said, 'We need this whole area to be off limits,' but we didn't have the data to be site specific. Although we're not the permitting agency -- we're advisers -- if we're going to advise, we need good data.
It's a safe bet to say with special regulations, it's more about managing people than managing fish. It's often more social than biological, putting streams into a Catch and Release or any other program.
We don't have anything up our sleeve ready to go. There's a lot to flesh out. But we want to at least start the discussion.
We didn't want to create another opening-day effect, especially for private landowners who might have been tempted to consider posting their ground if they were constantly bombarded with anglers.
I usually tell people 'low and slow,' meaning to add weight to their lines so they stay low in the streams and move more slowly in swift waters. That's my advice for how they're going to catch fish in high-moving waters. This year, low and slow definitely describes the streams.
The same features that make them easy to maneuver also make them unstable. They don't draught a lot of water. They just skim the surface. That makes them tippy and more dangerous.
If you think about it, the guys at the hatchery aren't going to stand there and count 1,000 trout when they load them.
The bottom line is, any stream or lake we are stocking is going to provide a quality fishing experience, and the number is not the judge of that. If people are so focused on the numbers, they are missing out on some really good fishing opportunities right in their own backyards.