Local issue: The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources has announced that Joe's Valley Reservoir in Emery County, Utah will be closed to fishing from November 1 through December 14, explaining that this is necessary to prevent the "exessive harvest of large spawning fish."



Now, it must be understood that the fish in question are Splake, which are hybrids of lake trout and brook trout. They are sterile, like mules, and although they go through the motions of spawning, they don't actually produce baby fish. The DWR started planting these fish in selected lakes 10-15 years ago, including Joe's Valley.



Joe's valley is not a good fishing lake. It has steep sides and poor soil, which product too little food for the fish. When you catch a fish there, it is usually skinny.


A few years ago the DWR started restricting the size of fish which could be taken there to less than 15" to longer than 22". In the past few years, some of my friends figured out where the bigger splake come close to shore to "spawn" and began catching fish bigger than 22", throwing most of them back. The word got out and last year a lot of people went to that spot and many caught these trophy fish. And that just drove the DWR nuts.

Some of these big fish are inadvertantly snagged or "foul hooked," which is against the law. In its press release, the DWR says:

The potential for serious injury or death from snagging injuries is considered high. DWR Southeastern Region Aquatics Manager Louis Berg likens foul hooking to wounding a deer. Catching and releasing numerous foul-hooked fish during a day of fishing is akin to shooting and wounding a number of deer during the deer season, but tagging only one.

Well, first of all, people don't normally know what the hook is doing out there until they haul in the fish. Sometimes, they get foul hooked when they try to bite the hook but miss. I don't know of anyone who deliberately tries to snag fish, although I have found some lures left behind when the lake goes down with hooks attached which were far too big. I suspect those were for snagging. Most of the time, you can't tell when you've snagged a fish until you reel it in, any more than you can avoid catching a fish of an illegal size. But when you shoot a deer, you presumably aim at it intentionally.


Secondly, a small cut made by a hook is not fatal. Occasionally you catch a fish which has swallowed the hook so deeply that its gills get cut when you remove the hook. Then it will bleed out and die. Of course, if its an illegal size, you throw it back and waste it, because that's the law. (Whenever this has happened to me, however, the seagulls snarfed it right up.) But when you shoot a deer with a high powered rifle it is seriously injured, often with broken bones. It may die from loss of blood, or be crippled for life.


Now the DWR, which wants to be seen as so humane, raises millions of fish in hatcheries every year and feed them grain until they are fingerlings, after which they carry them all over the state in tanks and dump them in lakes and streams. You can always tell when you've caught one of these "planters." Their fins and tails have been chewed down to nubs by other fish in the hatcheries.


In addition, the DWR regularly kills all the fish in lakes with rotenone, which prevents them from getting oxygen from the water and causes them to suffocate. They destroy millions of trout to get rid of "trash fish" like carp, chubs and suckers. Now they are planning to poison some drainages in a piscine version of ethnic cleansing. They want to restore these creeks and reservoirs to their "pristine" native populations of Colorado Cutthroat trout, by killing off all the half-breed trout which are there because the same DWR had planted Rainbow, German brown and Brook trout a long time ago. It is said that this is being done under threats from the Sierra Club, but I'm not sure if this is true.


So, one must question the logic of protecting the large Splake, which are sterile and non-native, while killing all fish of all sizes and types in order to achieve poltical and environmental correctness. The Division says that they need these big fish to eat the chubs which otherwise interfere with trout fishing. So, we can't fish for trout now because they eat the fish which interfere with trout fishing.


I used to enjoy fishing, but now it feels to fraught with pitfalls that it's not fun anymore, even when I'm fully within the law.


A few years back, when I was a public defender, I had to represent a guy who was in big trouble for bagging a black bear in an area which was off limits for bear. He had seen the bear, gone into town and bought a bear permit, then went back and shot it. The only notice that the canyon was off limits was published in the Elk Hunting proclamation. Recently, some campers noticed a bear cub in a tree near their campsite and located a DWR officer to come and get it. When he got to the scene, however, he shot the cub and killed it, because it would only starve to death otherwise. I think I know what the result would have been had the campers done the same thing.