Monthly Archives: April 2016

3 posts

River Access in Virginia Threatened Again

Geez, is this really happening again? Local landowners have filed a lawsuit over access to John’s Creek near New Castle, Virginia. This was triggered by the Virginia Marine Resources Commission (VMRC) re-evaluation of the navigability of fourteen waterways in the state in 2015, in response to… well, probably best to read the lawsuit story link above rather than relying on anything I could recount here.

This case is specifically about access to a waterway used by whitewater kayakers, but the interests of boaters and fisherman overlap quite a bit. These cases are now a few small steps from limiting all kinds of river access. Like the Jackson River and “Crown Grant” ruling a few years ago, this also goes back to property deeds granted under King George in the eighteenth century.

These are the waterways the VMRC ruled on last year — note that some of these are of interest if you’re a brook trout angler:

Johns Creek — Craig County

Barbours Creek — Craig County

Potts Creek — Craig and Alleghany counties

Blackwater River (North Fork)— Franklin County

Jennings Creek — Botetourt County

North Creek — Botetourt County

Colliers/Buffalo Creek — Rockbridge County

Irish Creek — Rockbridge County

Bullpasture River — Highland and Bath counties

Piney River — Amherst and Nelson counties

Passage Creek — Shenandoah and Warren counties

Cedar Creek — Shenandoah County

Gooney Run — Warren County

Wolf Creek — Tazewell and Bland counties

So what to do? Not sure right now. This is a breaking story, hopefully we will find out more soon.

Update: Haven’t seen anything yet, but more info will probably follow on the Virginia Rivers Defense Fund site.

Recommended Fishing Books

I’ve broken the resources page into two pages: websites and books. The websites page was the original “resources” page on the main menu. The books page is new, a list of books I own (with a couple exceptions) and highly recommend. It includes links to my Amazon affiliate account for each book which, given the traffic this site gets, may help me pay for a month or two of hosting over the course of a year, or a single lunch… if I’m lucky. Some of the books are no longer in print, though, but you can find them elsewhere if you look. Hope it’s helpful.

Big Things

Seen in places in Shenandoah National Park and elsewhere on the Blue Ridge this past month…

Big Fish – Don’t know what it is, but we’ve been catching lots of better-than-average-sized brook trout lately. Maybe it’s due to the past couple years of good rainfall.

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Big Rock Piles – Don’t know what it is, but sometimes we find these stacks of rocks. Do they mark good fishing spots? In this case (and in the case of the ones in my neighbor’s yard… been meaning to ask her about those), I can say no. And some don’t like seeing these things in wild places… probably with good reason.

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Big Critters – One of the two badass spiders we saw (dark fishing spider?).

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Big Little Flowers – These (some kind of bloodroot?) look big when the camera is in macro mode anyway, eh?

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More Big Fish – And fish can also look plenty big in macro mode, eh?

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