Chris Maroldy
With the bad sometimes comes some good. There’s a Tolkien quote that I took special note of recently—an utterance from Lord Of The Ring: “Oft evil will shall evil mar.”
We’ll not be on exactly that same existential level in this particular column, and far be it from me to personify Mother Nature (!) but this idea is stuck in the back of my head as I think about the long- and near-term future of trout fishing in the NC mountains in the wake of the wrath of Hurricane Helene.
Not to make light of things, but the hurricane may have given casual trout chasers like me a very useful excuse when we need to pull one.
As you might imagine, the storm changed how the creeks and rivers run, added and subtracted cover and structure, and killed a lot of fish. Two trout hatcheries were damaged badly, and over 600,000 hatchery fish died, including brood stock. That’s not to mention trout already out in the wild, where the storm not only made the waters deadly, but probably also ruined the spawn for a major segment of the population.
The effects of Helene will be felt for years to come.
How is this good news?
Well, have you ever had a fishing buddy who was a “counter?” I could come up with some other names for this type of sportsman, but they would be rude and mostly unprintable.
I’m talking about a guy who keeps track of how many fish everybody caught, recollects the sizes and the weights, the difficulty level of every outing, and somehow comes up on top in every reckoning with his fellow anglers. (If this type also hunts, he’s a statistician at that, too).
I had a friend like that, and while I mostly enjoyed his company for the few years he was around, I was a little relieved when he moved away. He was the champ of belt-notching.
But for a while, he and I and two or three other guys would go up to Cherokee to trout fish in the spring, early in the season. It was a great getaway after the doldrums of winter, and we did pretty well despite occasional weather challenges and predictable problems with fishing pressure on public waters.
Several years, we fished waters that had flooded in the recent past, and it was like learning the territory from scratch. But that was baby poo compared to the dump Helene took on the area.
Nature is always changing; fish and game adjust. Still, I think twice and three times when I think I might like to fish or hunt an area following a major storm.
But the good news for guys like me is that when you *do* go up to the mountains after trout in the foreseeable future and your buddy launches into his “You suck and I rule” routine, comparing creels, your response can be, “Yeah, but the hurricane.”
Oh, wait. He’s fishing in the same conditions as you.
Drat. Foiled again.
But what if his stringer broke? His creel developed a gaping hole in the bottom? His line kept breaking?
It may be that our only option with The Statistician, even in the face of a force of nature, is sabotage.
