Outdoor Report
For less than the cost of a full tank of gas, a family of four can fish for a year.
With the increasing demands in the work place and busy schedules, people are learning that fishing is a great way to spend time with family and friends. However, with rising fuel costs and difficult economic times, many people are looking to stay closer to home. Fortunately for Virginians, there’s a lake, river or stream within an hour’s drive from any location in the state, making it easy and economical to get away from it all for a day on the water, fishing, and relaxing.
All Virginians Benefit
While many Virginians benefit from the recreational aspect of fishing, all Virginians benefit from the conservation and economic activity generated by anglers. Recent studies show that recreational anglers are major powers when it comes to the strength of the economy. Virginia is home to or a destination for more than 800,000 anglers each year. Fishing alone is responsible for more than $1.3 billion in economic impact in the state. In 2006, 13% of the U.S. population 16 years old and older, 29.9 million anglers, spent an average of 17 days fishing. Freshwater fishing remains the most popular type of fishing with over 25.4 million anglers devoting 434 million angler-days to the sport.
Virginia: A Nationally Recognized Destination
With the Chesapeake Bay, our coastal waters, rivers, lakes, and our trout cold, clear streams of the Blue Ridge, Virginia is a nationally recognized destination for anglers. Recreational sports, such as fishing, are tremendously important to the strength of our state’s economy. Anglers in Virginia invest millions of dollars every year in fisheries conservation and management, much of this through the purchase of fishing licenses which are a primary funding source for most fish and wildlife agencies.
Fishing Supports Jobs & the Economy
According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, fishing outranks football, baseball and tennis as one of America’s favorite outdoor pastimes. Nationally, in one year, anglers spent nearly $19 billion on bait, boat rentals, and other equipment, $18 billion on food and lodging during fishing trips and $5.5 billion on licenses, memberships and other resources according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Together, fishing related industries and recreational anglers support hundreds of thousand jobs and add millions of dollars to state tax revenues, providing significant support to the nation’s overall economy through recessions as well as booms, according to recent reports from several sources including the American Sportfishing Association and Southwick Associates.
Virginia has over 3,300 miles of cold water streams, 25,000 miles of warm water streams, 13,000 acres of small impoundments, and 163,000 acres of large impoundments that are open to the public for fishing.
State fingerling program
The fingerling stocking program is the smallest of the state’s three management programs. It is designed to take advantage of the natural potential of high-elevation lakes, deep reservoirs, cold water tail waters, and spring-fed streams to produce quality trout fishing opportunities where wild fisheries are not possible due to the lack of natural reproduction.
Because summer water temperatures are usually a limiting factor to trout survival in Virginia, under this program a stream or lake must provide suitable, year-round water temperatures for trout survival, have good habitat and be productive enough to provide adequate food for good growth.
Suitable trout waters are stocked once annually with fingerling or sub-catchable (smaller than the legal size limit) trout, and often length limits and angling gear restrictions are imposed to protect these small fish until they reach harvestable size. In areas receiving heavy fishing pressure, special gear restrictions are often necessary to avoid high hooking mortality rates that can occur when bait fishing is permitted. These fish will often be caught several times before they eventually reach harvestable size, and the program can only be successful if hooking mortality remains low.
Depending on the length limit, these stocked fish will not reach a legal size for six months to two years. During this time, trout lose most of their hatchery characteristics, both in appearance and behavior, and create a fishery that approaches a wild one in terms of fishing experience.
Some of Virginia’s most exciting trout fishing opportunities can be found within our fingerling stocking program, and by stocking small fish once a year, a high quality fishery can be developed at a fraction of the cost of the more common put-and-take program.
Many anglers have discovered this quality angling and participation in the program is growing. The Department recognizes this growing interest and is continuing to develop new waters in the state.
–Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries
