Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, you understand the urgent concern over stream access. Where access is taken away, that can logically be construed as a threat to the fly fishing industry. No place to go, nobody to fish… nobody to fish, nobody to buy… and so on, and so forth.
But is access really the thorny issue it’s made out to be? Some states, for better or worse, don’t have that “high water mark” open access law. In places like Colorado, for example, with its dense population and limited public water, fly fishing still flourishes… how can that be?
“Access is not a public/private issue, it is an information/knowledge issue,” says David Leinweber, owner of Angler’s Covey in Colorado Springs. Tell Leinweber that Colorado has limited access, and he’ll likely call you a whiner… there’s plenty of river to go around, and not enough effort by anglers to get there.
To aid in that effort, Leinweber has listed over 100 places to go fishing in Colorado on the Angler’s Covey website… 66 of them are less than two hours from the shop. Note the “Where to Fish” section right on the home page…
Where do you net out on doling out information? Obviously, nobody will complain about a surplus of public opportunity… but are the days of the “secret place” gone forever, or… for the sake of the fly shop, should they be?
Is the information barrier higher than any fence with a posted sign around prime trout water?
