This is a rant. It’s meant to be encouraging. If you love wild trout fishing in Pennsylvania we are at a point where we need to consider changing our traditional approaches.
I won’t go into the gory details here but William Kosmer has two great posts about the summit on his blog HERE and HERE. They are well worth your time if you seriously want to understand the issues facing wild trout in Pennsylvania.
What does need to be discussed is: where do we go from here?
The afterglow of the summit is reaching its zenith and soon it will be forgotten and replaced by talk and posts of football and hunting. (thanks for that one Bill)
And truthfully, why not? Why shouldn’t we move on to something else to talk about. After all, talk is cheap.
Everything that really needed to be said has been said. There is a great network of wild trout anglers that are now in communication with each other. How wonderful is that!?
But let’s go back to that football theme. You have many people coming to the game from different directions. And it’s going to take everyone to win this game. It is easy to sit in the stands with clever slogans and empty gestures when you don’t put any skin in the game. Even still you have those with good skills and thoughts who will remain on the sidelines. You even have the old-timer Monday morning quarterbacks ever-ready with the cliche’ quip “I told you so.”
I get it. It can be frustrating for everyone involved. There are folks in the fight for wild trout who have worked harder than many of us will ever know over more years than some of us have been alive. It’s been a long fight with seemingly little progress, I understand.
But let’s not waste this momentum. This is a real opportunity to bring together the factions and “unite the clans.” As Henry Ramsay, a fellow Scotsman, points out we need “…the excitement to see it through or retain the belief that something can be done.”
As I said before, talk is cheap, we all know that. So what can the wild trout factions, DO to make changes?
Well for starters I suggest we join together in a unified group, a coalition. A group that will work together to educate and spread excitement of Pennsylvania wild trout fishing the public while also being a voice of influence in Harrisburg.
In Lancaster County the Amish have a saying: “Many hands make light work.” We have all hands on deck right now, let’s see if we can take them off the keyboard long enough to build something with them?
