Wow! Court is that you? I do hope you are sincere about your attitude adjustment. I also apologize for my past note directed to you although you did open the door by naming me as being both foolish and stupid. Hopefully the hatchet can be lost to this user group issue. All of us need to just live and let live regardless of personal opinions or preferences.
I’ve heard that some companies are considering to drop their adds from Island Angler paper. My apologies Andrew. I appreciate you publishing my letter and hope that this issue has not hurt your business. If Courtney cleans up his articles a little I’m sure everybody will continue their adds.
Someone emailed me this and perhaps you already are aware of this stuff. There are many more important biological factors controlling the fish stocks. Catch and release roe fishing is not going to cause the demise of the steelhead species.
Someone emailed me this and perhaps you already are aware of this stuff. I found it very interesting. We all need to come together and direct are ambitions to finding solutions that will truly protect our beloved fish from the environmental issues that will continue to threaten them.
River bed covered with rock snot - Courtesy, M. Bothwell
If you're a fan of a good mystery, you'll love the story of Didymosphenia geminata. This freshwater alga is so small, you can't see it with the naked eye. And for almost two centuries, it was thought of as a species endemic to the northern hemisphere that never did anyone any harm. But almost twenty years ago, Vancouver Island became the epicentre of an outbreak of algae blooms that covered the bottoms of rivers in a thick, slimy blanket, which people called "rock snot". Dr. Max Bothwell, a freshwater ecologist with Environment Canada in Nanaimo, BC, was called in to investigate. But after years of research, he found no explanation for the dramatic blooms. It wasn't until 2004, when he got a call from New Zealand reporting their own rock snot invasion, that some missing pieces of the puzzle started to emerge. When he looked more closely at some of the pristine locations this alga seemed to favour, they appeared to be the same locations favoured by a growing community of globetrotting fly fishers. What's more, around the time these algal blooms started to appear, fly fishers were routinely starting to sport waders with felt soled bottoms - which are perfect transportation vessels for microorganisms. But fly fishers dragging algal spores around the globe only solves one part of the mystery. It is still not known why an endemic species suddenly started acting like an invasive one, as it did on Vancouver Island.