I had the pleasure of being a guest on The Guide Post, the American Saltwater Guides Association podcast.
Known for “serving fresh chum daily,” Brian Bennett and the Moldy Chum crew utilize an “irreverently serious voice” to cover all aspects of fishing, the industry, and conservation. We were pleased to have Brian stop by #TheGuidePost to chop it up about conservation challenges, anadromous fish and the impact of “the five H’s”.
Good stuff, Brian. Listening to a download of the pod as I write. Thirty or so minutes in – you’re talking about about the great Thompson River steelhead run very quickly “blinking out”, then go on to quote a friend of ours, “We’re running out of North,”. Very good, We are, indeed. I was saying the same to some very wealthy Brits (and their sporting-travel agents) who were travelling futher and further afield from 1990 onwards find bg bangs for their buck, sure-fire Atlantic salmon (even to Ernest Schwiebert, who at the time, he told me, was moving his salmon-fishing efforts from Iceland to the new, super-prolific Russian Kola, when we met for the one and only time in the bar of a fancy Argentine trout lodge beside the Rio Malleo, at which he was a guest and myself a “trout bum” living in a tiny, one man – one girl tent in the groundsin, in March 1994.
He merely raised a quizzical eyebrow,
“Look at the slow but sure downward trend of the Briitish salmon runs, chaps.” I had told some of my long- and very well-fished British salmon-fisher friends and acquaintances a couple of years earlier. “One day, those fish, especially in southern Britain, will stop coming back completely…”
They as good as have, in the case of a number once-notable rivers, over the past decade or so.
You’ve heard my “I might as well have broken into their homes and made off with their favourite Springer spaniels and Labradors” about the response to another Bootean pronouncement before – it wasn’t quite as bad as that, one which came a few 1990s years later, but it was getting there..
Every bit as much as looking after rivers and their watersheds, I have long believed – no, known in my very water – that it is about climate, climate, climate and a “running out of North”…..
Got to get our asses into gear, guys- fast.
“friend of yours” correction, plus any other errors that I missed after writing then reading through thr above at outta here speed.