lois lake fish farm part 1

[cunner12]

All of the rainbows I have caught from Lois have adipose fins, but they are definitely escapees from the pens.

[canoehead]

This is a bit of a sad thread for me, being a third generation of born-and-raised Powell Riveritte who now lives somewhere else. My family fished the Gordon Pashas before the roads went up into Khartoum Lake, and my grandfather regularly caught cutthroats up to 9 lbs. As a kid, I enjoyed a tonne of success fishing in those lakes, and in the nearby lakes along the canoe route. I never liked the idea of fish farming on that system, because it was system, however, not liking it doesn't change the fact that the fish farming and the inevitable escapement have changed the system just like the dam did much earlier. For those of you who still live local, you know where you can find more pristine fishing experiences. For those that like fishing Lois Lake for the big fish caught with regularity there, keep fishing it. The thing that worries me is the spawning and the cross breeding of species. The introduced rainbows in the Bow River system have aggressively crossed with the cutthroat there to produce cuttbows to the point that it is a very special thing to catch a true cutthroat at all on the Bow. If you do, it is likely near one of the tributaries that flow in from the foothills.

We can't change what has happened, but hopefully we can improve the decisions that determine what damage we inflict on this place in the future. I can't see them removing the fish farms after all this time, so perhaps they should only be allowed to grow fish that are unable to reproduce? I definitely think that there should be very liberal catch-and-keep limits for the newly-introduced salmon species that have escaped, and the reverse of that is very limited opportunities to retain any of the native cutthroat.