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Guest essay: Fly fishing on 9/11

Our trips began as local fishing excursions, but as the years ran on, we graduated from these day trips around the Finger Lakes to long weekends, heading ever further to destinations unknown, until we graduated to weeklong trips into Montana, Colorado, Mexico and the Bahamas. Our mutual adventures in freshwater and salt made us comrades of fly fishing, strengthened our friendship and improved our skills. Our resident accountant Jean also owns a fly fishing travel service called Travel Adventures, so he took care of the yearlong work of planning the trip. He found us a lodge in Alaska that was highly regarded for trophy rainbow trout: the Copper River Lodge in Iliamna. We settled on heading up in the early fall of the following year after the salmon run, so we could find plenty of well-fed, bulked-up rainbow trout. The Copper River Web site hails the location “as one of the premier wild rainbow rivers in Alaska; and considered by many, one of the premier rivers in the world. It is a state of Alaska designated ‘trophy rainbow river’ and regulated to ‘fly fishing only; catch and release.’ This designation has kept the fishing on the river outstanding with some of the largest rainbows in Alaska. “The Copper River is a classic trout stream packed with long, dry, fly glides; deep winding pools studded with boulders; faster riffles; and deep undercut banks just begging for a mouse fly. Unlike other tundra rivers in Alaska, the shallow but wide Copper runs through a scenic river valley lined with groves of cottonwood, spruce, and birch. Aside from their beauty, these trees offer the fly fishermen refuge from the relentless northern winds.” The year of planning passed quickly and the trip was soon upon us. Some among our group had frequent flyer miles to burn, so we broke up into subgroups and took different airlines, intending to join up in Anchorage.

Fish in hot water pose tough dilemma « Simple Climate

. “It is likely that these salmon will decline, and may not persist to the end of the century.”

Salmon are famous for their exhausting upstream “run” from the ocean back to the water they hatched in, where they spawn the next generation of fish, and then die. It’s estimated that at the beginning of the 20th century the waters in California’s Central Valley, running from San Joaquin to Sacramento, teemed with 1-3 million Chinook salmon making this journey every year. In the last five years this number has fallen below 100,000, contributing to ocean stocks declining to levels where no salmon fishing was allowed off the California coast in 2008 and 2009 . There are many reasons for this, including overfishing, changing sea conditions and water quality.

In the Sacramento-San Joaquin River system, each season there is a run of Chinook salmon spawning. The spring run used to number approximately 1 million fish in 18 separate populations, but they have been reduced to approximately 16,000 in three groupings. Spring run Chinook salmon are therefore listed as threatened under both the California and US Endangered Species acts, Thompson said. “The adults must survive the summer in freshwater before spawning in the fall,” she noted. That means they are waiting to spawn during the state’s hottest, driest months, where raised temperatures can kill them. In trying to stay cool, the salmon can get trapped on the wrong side of stretches of warmer river water separating them from their spawning grounds .

“In all cases, we predicted that summer streamflow will be lower and water temperatures will be higher,” Thompson said. “There was increased summer mortality of adult salmon and the population declined. For all the A2 combinations, and half the B1 combinations, by the end of the century no adult salmon could survive the summer. We found that by forgoing a water diversion to the hydropower plant during the critical mid-summer period, and leaving that water in the stream, the water stayed cooler and salmon persisted up to 17 years longer.

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