Originally Posted By: Abu-Loomis
There ARE wild fish left and there IS a huge difference between wild and hatchery steelhead.


I generally agree, though I believe there are some hatchery stocks that come close to wild in terms of aggression and fighting. Most of them, however, are integrated stocks that depend on mining the wild stocks, so without the natives, there are few good salmonids out there. In the 1930's, Roderick Haig-Brown wrote of hooking multiple (wild) steelhead per hole on an upstream-presented dry fly. Good luck ever getting a single hatchery fish to do that.
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If every fisherman would pick up one piece of trash, we'd have cleaner rivers and more access.