Regulations For Browns Need To Change!

[Gavin]

Brute...I think your wrong...There is plenty of food and habitat on the Current...Sculpins, Stonerollers, & Minnows all over the place. Trout guts too...Its not a wild fishery and the limiting factors seem to be a lack of natural reproduction and angler harvest. Dunno, if you fished there years ago...Fishing has improved twice in my memory...Mid 1990's when they banned bait...Mid 2000's when the went from 3>15" to one over 18"...took a couple years to grow em from 14.5 to 18" plus...but there are more 18" plus fish on that river today, than there ever were years ago.

I dont know how much it will improve on the Current if they only allow the park anglers one fish. The Current doesnt have as much room for improvement in comparisson to some of our other brown trout fisheries. I think that the Niangua, Meramec, and NFoW below Patrick would take off.

[fishinwrench]

It's my perception that tbe Current has a near perfect balance going on as it stands. Nice Browns are caught there with just the right degree of regularity IMO.

Nobody gets all that excited about a big brown from the White.... cuz huge browns are everywhere and a tad too common.

In my not so popular curmudgeon'like opinion a big trout shouldn't be an everyday occurance. Something gets lost when it is.

[Nortrad]

Brute...I think your wrong...There is plenty of food and habitat on the Current...Sculpins, Stonerollers, & Minnows all over the place. Trout guts too...Its not a wild fishery and the limiting factors seem to be a lack of natural reproduction and angler harvest. Dunno, if you fished there years ago...Fishing has improved twice in my memory...Mid 1990's when they banned bait...Mid 2000's when the went from 3>15" to one over 18"...took a couple years to grow em from 14.5 to 18" plus...but there are more 18" plus fish on that river today, than there ever were years ago.

I dont know how much it will improve on the Current if they only allow the park anglers one fish. The Current doesnt have as much room for improvement in comparisson to some of our other brown trout fisheries. I think that the Niangua, Meramec, and NFoW below Patrick would take off.

I'd love to see the N. Fork developed. Have never fished the Niangua. I agree with the general trend of bigger browns.

[Al Agnew]

Seems to me that the argument for more restrictive regs on browns within Montauk would go something like this: Browns are not stocked in the park, they are stocked in the river below. The park was never intended to be a brown trout management area, the river below is. So they are managing the river with a one fish/18 inch limit on browns (and rainbows as well, but the rainbows are different in that the park is an integral part of the management strategy with rainbows, since many if not most of the rainbows in the river were originally stocked in the park.) Now, if the browns that they are stocking in the river are moving up into the park during hot weather to avoid the stress, and they are being caught in large numbers within the park, then the management strategy for the river is being bypassed or subverted by people in the park keeping those fish.

Wrench, I've given your curmudgeonly comment some thought. There is something to be said for big fish being rare enough to be a special occurrence when you catch one. But I don't think that this would ever be a matter of improving the big fish fishing in the river to the point where every nimrod can walk down to the pool at Tan Vat and catch a 24 incher. It's more of an issue of people wanting there to be a "normal" population of big fish...a big brown residing in every choice pool. Seems to me that if a lot of big browns are indeed being cropped off in the park, it would depress the population of big fish below. Big browns are tough enough to catch that there can be a lot of them in the river and not all that many would normally be caught. If there aren't many left in the river, then catching one is going to be a rare occurrence.

I haven't been to the Current since last spring during the high, murky water. At that time, there were definitely a bunch of big fish in the river. Caught a couple myself, and saw plenty more caught (and not all released). We're talking fish well over 20 inches, including one I saw that a young guy was carrying to his truck in a big net, a huge male that had a mouth big enough to fit your fist in with plenty of room left over. The thing had to be ten pounds or better. Now it took several years for those fish to get big, at least a couple years of growing AFTER they reached the legal amount of inches. It isn't like they stock them at 20 inches. So seeing them scarfed up because they retreated to the park because the weather last summer was so hot is pretty painful.

[Addicted to Creeks]

can someone explain to this dumb young redneck why the regulations shouldn't change to protect browns that run up towards the springs in the summer? or are we jus arguing because its the internet and we can?

[fishinwrench]

I'll have to plead ignorance now. I didn't realize that browns were not stocked in the park. In that case... Hell no the rules on what is considered a keeper brown, nor the daily possession limit shouldn't change simply because a fish moved upstream of a cable.

That's ubsurd. Not to mention an enforcement nightmare.

[Addicted to Creeks]

if its a failure on the original regulations part why not? if i may ask

as i see it this is an oversight on the part of mdc since just by looking at the way brown trout are managed in the state they are designed to be a trophy fishery in other areas why not here? why allow them to grow larger in the blue ribbon sections if they are going to be slaughtered every time we have a hot summer?

[Gavin]

Absurd is the right word. Match the reg below the park...and establish a 1 brown trout statewide limit. They only stock 40-50,000 of them a year...8,0000 to the Current, 6,500 to the NFoW, 5,000 or so to the Meramec and Niangua, 10,000 or so to Taney....some other places.

[Greasy B]

One thing that hasn't be discussed is the fact that browns cannot be raised to catchable size efficiently in hatchery raceways. They will never lend themselves to put and take fishing. In order to reach a decent size they must be in a river. That alone justifies strict protections.

[laker67]

One thing that hasn't be discussed is the fact that browns cannot be raised to catchable size efficiently in hatchery raceways. They will never lend themselves to put and take fishing. In order to reach a decent size they must be in a river. That alone justifies strict protections.

I am reasonably sure that SOH raises them to 13 inch before release. that would be considered stocker or catchable size.