Dan Rodricks: Conditions and conscience, fishing less because of climate change | STAFF COMMENTARY

My old friend Calvert Bregel, gone 12 years now, used to treat me to trips on his great boat, the Miss Demeanor, to fish for Chesapeake striped bass — rockfish, as they are known around here — and we had many merry times on the bay.

With Bill Burton, who was for decades the outdoors writer of the bygone Evening Sun, we caught lots of fish and released most. Now and then, we took a rockfish home for supper, but the idea was more camaraderie than consumption.

Calvert loved the bay and greatly enjoyed fishing and hunting. But, in the last years of his life, he became troubled, even mournful, about what we saw during our excursions out of Middle River — fewer rock, smaller rock and some sick-looking rock.

“It makes me not want to fish anymore,” Calvert said, words I never expected to hear.

At first, I attributed his melancholy to the passage of time — Calvert lived to 84 — and the passing of friends. But it really was the decline of the bay and the fishery that bothered him, especially the up-and-down state of the stripers he had been catching all his life, having grown up between Baltimore and his family’s Eastern Shore farm.

I have started to feel as Calvert did — not to the point of giving up fishing in Maryland waters completely, but to at least acknowledge that my future fishing will be greatly curtailed by conditions and conscience.

It’s a reality of the age of climate change: Warming waters and warming air temperatures are altering the oceans and rivers and the fish that live in them, and it’s happening more rapidly than ever.

These changing conditions are cited regularly now by marine biologists whenever state governments present new regulations for recreational and commercial fishing.

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources just rolled out modified rules for the coming year to protect rockfish in the bay.

After recording a significant and steady decline in the population of young-of-year rock, DNR plans to take the emergency step of canceling what’s known as the spring trophy season. That’s a long tradition in the upper Chesapeake, when anglers were allowed to target the large, mature stripers that swim up the bay to spawn.

By canceling the spring striper season, the hope would be to relieve those magnificent creatures of the stress of being hooked, netted and photographed by anglers who like to pose for pictures with their large catch.

That aspect of Maryland fishing has never interested me because it never made sense. Why are we allowed to hook fish during a time when we need them to spawn?

The new DNR rules on rockfish have made me reassess my desire to go each April to the creeks that feed the Susquehanna River to fish for shad. The spring migration is the only chance we get to target those silvery fish that swim from the Atlantic all the way up the bay to Conowingo Dam.

Hooking and playing shad with a fly rod can be downright exhilarating. But one Sunday last spring I remember having thoughts I never had before — that the 20 or so shad I just caught and released would have been better off had I spent the day photographing the bald eagles along Octoraro Creek.

A biologist will say that I worry too much, that any healthy shad caught with a barbless hook and quickly released will survive to contribute to the proliferation of the stock.
But I still have those thoughts.

My son joins me frequently to fly fish for wild trout (and sometimes the stocked variety) in Maryland and Pennsylvania rivers; we practice catch-and-release fishing exclusively.

One day, as we fished unsuccessfully in the Gunpowder River near Monkton, he remarked that the days we fish for trout will be greatly reduced in the future. Trout need cold, clean water; the warming temperatures of water and air stress them too much.

These conditions have prompted the state to advise anglers to avoid targeting trout during the hottest periods of the day during the hottest periods of the year.

Not everyone goes along with this. Some anglers, determined to fish on summer vacation, walk right past the state’s advisories and onto the stream banks with their fishing rods in July and August and into dry, hot September. It’s not a good practice for sustaining a wild fishery.

Even if we stabilize the climate in the next couple of decades, I think my son is correct: We are going to move our fishing days into the coolest and coldest months, and that’s assuming that we fish at all.

It’s not a given.

The inland and coastal fisheries are all fragile, now more than ever, and it’s the mass of human activity that brought us here.

So it’s conditions and conscience that make me question something I’ve been doing for fun, thrill, solace and camaraderie all my life. And I’m sure I’m not the only angler who has had these thoughts.

Kirk Deeter, the editor-in-chief of Trout Unlimited’s magazine, wrote about taking time away from fishing, then mulling whether he should return to it. He ended up about where I am, at least for now: “My best day of fishing all summer involved catching one fish, then spending the next hour watching a bald eagle preen on a tree branch above me. When she finally flew off, I figured I should probably head for home too.”