Worth 1.2 billion to the BC economy? Yet gets 3rd place in decisions on access to fishing opportunities. No wonder people don't buy licenses as much.
......and video games
B.C. Sets bait for more recreational anglers
Campaign seeks to reverse dwindling interest
Scott Simpson
Vancouver Sun
Saturday, July 21, 2007
British Columbia is beginning to distance itself from a worldwide trend toward declining interest in recreational fishing.
Fishery managers in almost every developed nation around the world have been fretting since the early 1990s about the growing number of people walking away from the sport in favour of other pursuits.
In B.C., home to some of the best and most accessible sport fishing on the planet, the province is selling 29 per cent fewer annual freshwater fishing licences than in 1993-94, and federal sales of annual saltwater licences are down 47 per cent during the same period.
Two months ago, the American Sportfishing Association told a Congressional subcommittee about a similar trend across the U.S., and noted a parallel decline in many traditional outdoor pursuits including camping and visits to parks -- trends also noted here in B.C.
However, in the last couple of years, the longer-term angling trend appears to be reversing itself in B.C. -- good news for a tourism-focused industry with an annual $1.2-billion value to the provincial economy.
Inspired by a wildly successful marketing campaign in England, where licence sales are up more than 40 per cent, B.C. is beginning to reel in new and lapsed anglers.
Annual freshwater licence sales were up six per cent to 190,000 in 2006-2007, compared to a multi-decade low of 177,000 two years earlier.
The campaign is being led by the Freshwater Fisheries Society of B.C., a non-profit organization working in partnership with the provincial government to make fishing easier -- and more successful.
The society has published a series of reader-friendly fishing guides packed with generous details on where, how and when to fish, highlighted by full-page features on beginner-class lakes that are heavily stocked with catchable trout. The guides provide tips on lures, bait and flies, as well as maps that reveal the depth of the water at all points on those lakes.
In April, the society released its first full-blown marketing plan, a 10-year project to increase licence sales 30 per cent for adults and kids.
To achieve that goal, the report said, B.C. has to maintain its natural advantages -- lots of fish and unspoiled scenery -- and also make a "substantial, sustained and strategic investment in product development and promotion."
Society president Don Peterson said the decline is even greater than license sales suggest.
A recent analysis written for the provincial government pointed to three factors in the decline:
n Immigrants for whom fishing was not a part of their early lives.
n An increasingly urban population without links to the province's vast wilderness.
n Aging boomers taking up other pursuits.
Kids also have other distractions -- notably video games.
"We've lost something in the order of 70,000 adult anglers since the early 1990s, which is disturbing, particularly when you consider the population of the province has increased by almost a million people in that same period," Peterson said.
"So not only are we losing our market share, we're not taking any advantage of the overall growth in the population of the province."
Peterson said the traditional approach in fisheries management is to issue a set of regulations detailing catch limits and angling restrictions on individual lakes, stock fish in them, and then more or less step back and leave anglers to themselves.
Peterson had his eyes opened to the potential of an alternative approach when he attended a world conference on recreational fishing in Norway in 2005.
A panelist for England, Guy Mawle, caught everyone's attention when he talked about booming license sales in that country.
"They recognized the traditional approach wasn't working and adopted a marketing approach, which is basically to find out what the customers want, and give it to them.
"We decided if they can do it in England, surely we can do it here in British Columbia with the kinds of fishing resources we have here."
Future endeavors envisioned in the plan include the development of a website where anglers can -- for the first time -- buy fishing licences online, from wherever they have access to a computer instead of scheduling a trip to a sporting goods store.
Data in previous surveys has shown that, often, a decision by occasional anglers to go fishing is spur-of-the-moment, and the time consumed in obtaining a licence is a potential deterrent.
At present, the society is sitting on boxes of hundreds of thousands of receipts from past licence years -- but lacks the financial resources to analyze that data for the benefit of anglers.
"As part of the marketing approach, you need to understand who your customers are and be able to survey them," Peterson said. "That's going to be a key for us going forward from both a fisheries-management and a marketing perspective."
Regulations will also be simplified.
Society senior fisheries biologist Brian Chan envisions a new system comparable to the one used on ski hills -- with regulations connoting which lakes provide only the most basic challenges, ranging all the way up to those demanding the greatest measures of skill and patience.
"Green run" lakes would be heavily stocked and family friendly, whereas lightly stocked lakes promising the reward of big fish to persistent anglers might fall into a sort of "triple black diamond" category.
He said the society also wants to find a way to advise novice anglers that lakes popular with skilled fishers may contain fish that have been caught and released several times, and won't respond to primary fishing techniques.
As the fishery evolves, it's creating new business opportunities as well.
Even among skilled anglers, Chan said, fishing gear is getting increasingly sophisticated.
He now considers a depth sounder, a device associated with saltwater anglers, indispensible.
"I put it under my pillow every night," jokes Chan, British Columbia's reigning expert on lake fly-fishing.
The units have no benefit for finding fish, he said, but are very useful for anglers who are trying to identify the depth at which fish are likely to be feeding so they can determine what fly to use.
"For most anglers, the days of using a marked anchor rope is long gone."
One of the most striking changes in the freshwater fishery is a renaissance in the use of classic European two-handed or "spey" rod casting techniques for fly-fishing salmon and steelhead on B.C. rivers.
B.C. angling pioneers such as Roderick Haig-Brown and Gen. Noel Money used them to great effect on Vancouver Island streams in the 1920s and '30s, but until about a decade ago, most anglers regarded them as the trappings of an elite form of the sport.
But no more.
Spey casting instructor Dana Sturn said many new students are making the jump directly from tackle and float-fishing, without the intermediate step of an apprenticeship on single-handed fly rods.
Sturn said a primary reason is that the far-reaching two-handed rods are recognized as the most effective way to cover the broad expanse of water that's available on a typical British Columbia stream.
Sturn is co-founder of the world's most popular forum on spey casting --
www.speypages.com -- which established B.C. as an international destination for the sport.
Contributors range from beginners to world-ranked experts, checking in from around the world.
One of the site's objectives is to promote conservation, echoing another B.C. tradition that dates back to Haig-Brown.
"Our sports are blood sports," Sturn said. "We do impact nature, and because of that we have a responsibility to act as very vocal stewards of that resource. We have to think about that resource first, rather than ourselves."
It was a conservation problem, a sharp decline in coho populations in the Strait of Georgia, that slashed saltwater licence sales by 47 per cent from a decade ago.
Fishing plunged but the stock has not recovered, suggesting that other environmental factors depressed the strait coho population.
Sport Fishing Institute spokesman Gerry Kristianson noted that saltwater fishing effort has been creeping back up in recent years.
The west coast of Vancouver Island has been a particular focus.
Walter Schoenfelder, who operates Quatsino Lodge with his wife Jean, worries that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans continues to favour the commercial fishing sector when it assigns salmon catch quotas and fish openings to the detriment of the recreational sector.
The Schoenfelders are raising 100,000 chinook smolts in a net pen near their waterfront lodge in Quatsino Sound in the expectation that their efforts will lead to an increase in the population of local chinook.
The former Campbell River couple barely do any marketing for their nine-room operation, but are nearly always booked from April to September since opening less than five years ago.
ssimpson@png.canwest.com- - -
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