In the interest of fairness though, I want to share with you this thread that appeared on the popular Pacific northwest fly fishing site Westfly.net.
I will not provide a link to the site or the post since they seem to think there was nothing wrong with what this fly fisherman was doing.
The fall Chinook runs were terrible this year.
The fish just did not show up in any numbers to warrant a fishery on them in most rivers and most people accepted that and fished for other species.The few that were present were pretty easy to spot and the temptation to see if one of these spent fish would take a fly is there. The unethical fly fisherman in the thread claimed to have been swinging flies for winter steelhead and "accidentally" snagged this spawned out fish, note the fly in the fish's dorsal fin As you can see in the picture this fish is near death with advanced fungus deterioration over it whole body. Although this fish has already spawned it was most likely guarding the redd where the spawning took place. These salmon are quite easy to spot in these conditions and most anglers avoid them.
Judge for yourself what this fly fisherman did and some of you might be familiar with the whole story.
My belief is this fish was intentionally snagged and the angler thought it would be great fun to take pictures of it.
This is the type of ammunition the detractors of our sport are looking for to use against us but apparently the prospect of a large fish on his fly rod proved to be too much for this fly fisherman. If the gear and bait guys point fingers at us after crap like this then we have it coming!
Had this person accidentally snagged this fish he should have broke it off immediately. Why he would take a picture and post it on the internet is beyond me.
He could have received citation for harassing this fish and would have if a game officer would have witnessed this.
So you can see we fly fishermen are not above stupid behavior just because we fish the way we do.
Please respect the resource and leave spawned out salmon to die in peace.
I dont know,,,, I've read your comments and I did see the westfly post a few days ago. I wasnt there so I will believe him when he said he didnt intentionally snag the salmon. Why he didnt break the fish of immediately,, I dont know, maybe he didnt want to loose his fly,, maybe he couldnt break the fish off,,again we were not there.
ReplyDeleteAgree with you that some people will use this as ammo against flyfisherman, and I not sure why he had to take a picture.
Bruce
Why do the fly guys and the bait guys have to be against each other? In the real world I hardly see this as a problem.
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