If you’re a fly fisherman and you’ve never worked a Parachute Adams over a feeding trout on a Montana creek, you’ve missed something special.

Western waters are famous for hefty cutthroat trout and lots of them. These riverine fisheries are an angler’s dream. What’s the secret? Quite simply it is the direct product of a no-brainer fisheries management strategy called “catch and release.” That’s right. It is based on the theory that if anglers are required to release fish, the fish will increase in size and numbers.

Having fished many Wyoming and Montana creeks during the past 10 years. I’m telling you that it works. Catch and release regulations produce incomparable fishing. There’s an irony in the West that is not lost on an Eastern angler. Waters that support cutthroat trout, which are native to the West, are almost exclusively catch and release. Yet the Montana creeks that contain Eastern brook trout, which are ancestral holdovers from an earlier era of fish stocking, allow the angler to kill 5 fish daily. (The long term strategy, I’m told, is to “cleanse” Western waters of non-native trout).

In fact, most Western fly fishermen are so ingrained in the catch and release ethic that anglers sporting a string of legal brookies will be greeted with rolling eyes and raised eyebrows. My sister, new to fly fishing, would sooner starve than kill and eat a legal trout. She was not impressed with my tongue-in-cheek allusion to “catch and fry.”

Joking aside, catch and release is more than a fashionable mantra of the elitist yuppie fly fisher person. It is a practical remedy for mediocre fishing. It is a sensible management strategy and the wave of the future for an angling community that really wants to catch lots of big fish, whether on a fly rod or a spin casting stick.

When it comes to catch and release, Maine has a long way to go before it catches up with the West. While it is true that Maine waters as fishery habitats differ markedly from the waters of Montana and Wyoming, this fact does not negate the value of catch and release regulations as a stepping stone to trophy trout waters in the Pine Tree State.

How can Maine do better?

First of all, Maine needs to be more aggressive in establishing catch and release waters. At present, we have about a dozen catch and release waters. This represents less than one quarter of a percent of our waters that are managed for brook trout. With 176 true remote wild trout ponds, Maine should consider designating at least 10 percent of these as catch and release waters. As Maine catch and release fishing activist Bob Mallard notes, “We have proof that it works. Just look at the Roach, Rapid and Sheepscot Rivers.”

Mallard’s other point is that you only have to look at the popularity of these waters to know that there is an emerging catch and release constituency within Maine’s broader angling community.

Catch and release has never been an easy sell in Maine, especially among an older generation of angling traditionalists who understandably like a few pan-fried brookies with their fiddlehead greens. But frying a trout and releasing a trout do not have to be mutually exclusive. In a well- managed fisheries program, we can have both. The challenge, of course, is to find the balance.We are not there yet by any stretch of the imagination.

The direction must come more from political leaders than fish biologists. With the exception of former Commissioner Ray “Bucky” Owen and his Quality Fishing Initiative, we have not had a lot of bold vision from the DIF&W “bully pulpit” when it comes to educating and agitating Maine’s angling community. Although an adroit administrator, former Commissioner Lee Perry did little to promote catch and release. And our present Fish and Wildlife Commissioner Dan Martin, a good man, is nonetheless not coming across as an adventurous leader who is willing to tell Maine anglers what they ought to hear rather than what they want to hear.

Without catch and release leadership from Augusta, the responsibility to enlighten Maine anglers in the enormous potential of catch and release as a trophy fish management strategy falls upon the shoulders of state fish and game clubs and angling organizations such as the Penobscot County Conservation Association, Trout Unlimited, the Sebago Anglers, Penobscot Fly Fishers, and others.

Meanwhile, Maine’s remote wild trout ponds await. These 176 ponds are precious natural resources, not only to Maine, but to North America. Many of them provide habitat for native brook trout with lineage as pure as mountain spring water. A few years ago, the Maine Department of Fish and Wildlife said that it was “undertaking an effort to foster greater appreciation for these remote trout ponds.”

To my knowledge little has been done in this regard. Making more of them catch and release waters would be a positive step.

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The author is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He is also a Maine Guide, co-host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors” heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on The Voice of Maine News-Talk Network (WVOM-FM 103.9, WCME-FM 96.7) and former information officer for the Maine Dept. of Fish and Wildlife. His e-mail address is [email protected].