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Show WILDLIFE REPORT UTAH STATE CXVlSlON OF WILDLIFE RESOURCES By Jon Leatham " Vt)1 Conservation Officer ( I """1 lul Several individuals have asked me about the probability of being able to fish the local mountain moun-tain lakes by the opening of fishing season. The only answer I have is that we'll have to wait and see. The general fishing season opens on June 2nd and the only lakes which are accessible acces-sible are Hidden Lake and Don's Lake. The streams are running run-ning very high and silty, so they w ill not be stocked stock-ed with fish until the run-off subsides. Some 21.000 fisharescheduled to be planted on the LaSal Mountains this year. With the limited waters available to fish, we must realize that in order to have some recreational fishing, w e have to operate oper-ate on a "put and take" basis. That is we stock fish where possible, and by the end of the year most fish have been caught. This is perfectly satisfactory where the fish would probably winter win-ter kill anyway. We can only plant a limited number of fish of a given size (10-12 inch catchables) which is economically feasible, and of course provides the desired recreation. True, this is not the quality fishing you might find in areas where quality qual-ity fishing waters are located, but it's the best that can be done. It costs approximately S.35 to raise a fish to the catchable size, so when you are talking about hundreds of thousands thou-sands of fish it amounts to a very large sum of money. It also doesn't take very many fish in your creel to pay for your license. I hope we can enjoy the fishing we do have and be true sportsmen in the field. We don't have to be greedy and catch every fish in one day but maybe we can leave a few for another day and perhaps for the next fisherman. Lake Powell fishermen fisher-men who fillet their fish are reminded to leave a portion of the skin on the fish they fillet so that species identification identifica-tion can be made by Conservation Con-servation Officers. |