A great fishing spot, trashed

This week’s column is more like a rant. It follows up on a recent blog post about litter at West Virginia’s Marmet Locks and Dam:

I went to one of the Kanawha Valley’s favorite fishing spots to get photos of people fishing.

I ended up taking photos of garbage.

The people were missing, driven off by bright sunshine, high humidity and 95-degree afternoon heat. I stood at the head of the stairways that led down to the Marmet Locks fishing pier, camera in hand, wondering if there might be fishermen on the banks downstream. To find out, I walked down the metal staircase to the fishing pier.

The farther I walked, the madder I got.

Trash littered the fishing pier from one end to the other. I stepped over Styrofoam worm tubs, balls of discarded fishing line, empty lure packages, plastic chicken-liver containers, pop cans, fast-food wrappers and chunks of broken-up Styrofoam coolers.

Plastic grocery bags filled with even more debris hung from the catwalk’s metal handrail. At least two trash bags, each stuffed with rubbish, lay on the cross-piers that supported the walkway.

The sight infuriated me so much I decided to share it with you. I started snapping photos. At the same time, I started putting together a mental outline for a column to accompany the images. This column.

At first I planned to call for the temporary closure of all Kanawha and Ohio River piers. “Let those litterbugs do without for a while, and maybe they’ll appreciate what a precious resource these fishing piers really are,” I thought. “Maybe then they’ll take clean up after themselves.”

I quickly realized, however, that such a draconian approach wouldn’t work.

For one thing, it’s not at all clear who would have the authority to order a closure. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers controls some of the facilities. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission controls others. The Division of Natural Resources has agreements with both entities to allow public access to the piers.

A call to Bret Preston, the DNR’s head of warm-water fisheries, revealed yet another complicating factor. Cleanup responsibilities don’t necessarily rest with the DNR, FERC or the Corps of Engineers. In some instances, a social service agency hires developmentally disabled people to clean up the piers. In Marmet’s case, the town government handles the cleanup.

I know what you’re thinking: “Why in the heck aren’t those entities doing a better job of keeping the place clean?”

My response: They shouldn’t have to. If anglers were being responsible, there wouldn’t be any trash to clean up.

“If you can carry it in, you should carry it back out,” a Boy Scout leader told me years ago.

Clearly that’s not happening at Marmet. Fishermen able-bodied enough to descend and climb the steep steps to the piers apparently don’t consider themselves able-bodied enough to carry out empty chicken-liver containers, even though they carried them in full.

Perhaps the summertime heat is making wimps of them. Maybe all that casting tires them out. Possibly — just possibly — the excitement of landing a 12-inch white bass turns their arms and legs to jelly. Or maybe they just don’t give a damn.

I vote for that last one.

Immature pangolins

Why in the world would anyone want to eat an anteater, let alone one covered in scales?

Apparently there’s quite an appetite for pangolin meat, which explains why Chinese authorities are having to guard against smugglers who traffic in pangolin carcasses.

Customs agents in the Chinese province of Guangdong recently intercepted one of the largest-ever shipments of illegally smuggled pangolins. The June 5 bust turned up 2,090 frozen pangolin carcasses and 92 cases of pangolin scales. The animals apparently had been collected  in southeast Asia by five Chinese nationals and were on a boat bound for the Xiangzhou port in Guangdong.

Pangolin meat and scales are prized in China. The meat is considered a delicacy, and the scales are believed to benefit breast-feeding mothers. Pangolins are rapidly disappearing in southeast Asia, and now we know why.

Yes, they DO catch fish!

This past weekend I traveled to the headwaters of West Virginia’s Elk River to report on fishermen who catch trout on tiny, tiny flies.

How tiny? “Standard” sized trout flies are usually tied on size-12 to size-18 hooks. These flies are tied on some of the smallest hooks available — size 28 to 32. In the photo at left, you can see (if you look closely) five of the flies arrayed around a dime.

I’m 55 years old. My close-up vision abandoned me years ago. Tying one of these itsy-bitsy pieces of fluff onto a gossamer leader now requires serious magnification. Even with a 4X magnifier, it took me half an hour just to tie a simple dry-and-dropper rig onto my leader.

And I still didn’t do it right. The first time the rig floated over a trout, the fish rose and slurped the dry. When I tightened the line, the fish surged — and the line went slack. One of my knots had slipped.

Moral of the story, at least for me? Don’t try to rig up while standing next to a stream filled with rising trout! Sometime in the near future, I’ll rig up several tippets’ worth of dry-and-dropper rigs in the comfort of my home, taking full advantage of the powerful magnifiers and intense lights I have at my disposal for fly tying.

When I was a young man, I tied size-22 flies by the dozen — without magnification and without particularly good light. Now I practically need a scanning electron microscope just to tie them to my leader, let alone create them from bits of fur and feathers. Getting old really stinks…