Pennsylvanians do love to fish! Andrew L. Shiels, director of bureau fisheries for the Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission, which is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year, estimates that a total of about 500,000 fishers are out during Pennsylvania’s opening days of trout season, counting both the one for the South Central region and for the rest of the state. Using a population-based formula he suggested, it seems there may be something like 13,000 in Centre County alone.
It’s not just Pennsylvanians who love to fish in the Keystone State, though. Fishing aficionados from all over the nation and beyond come to the commonwealth to fish, especially for trout. And all this fishing fanaticism is bringing big-time bucks into the state, with a big chunk of them into Centre County, where the PFBC has a regional office in Pleasant Gap that will soon be moving to the Penn Eagle Industrial Park. (A ribbon-cutting ceremony and open house at the new Centre Regional Office, 595 East Rolling Ridge Drive in Bellefonte, is scheduled for July 23.)
John Arway, executive director of the Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission (PFBC), says the last national survey of fishing, hunting, and wildlife-associated recreation indicated that Pennsylvania had more than a million anglers who spend $1.2 billion in the state every year, a figure that rivals fruit and vegetable agriculture as an industry in the state.
150 and counting
Fishing wasn’t always so good in Pennsylvania. It took proactive public servants, thoughtful legislation, public funding, and hard work to bring us to the happy fishing state of affairs now enjoyed in Pennsylvania.
It all started in 1866 with a concerted effort by concerned legislators and citizens to restore American shad to the Susquehanna River. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the establishment of a state commissioner tasked with that mission, which entailed efforts to deal with the adverse effects from water pollution caused primarily by, at the time, the large-scale logging of Pennsylvania’s forests.
Pennsylvania has more miles of streams and rivers, about 86,000, of any state in the continental United States and some 4,000 lakes.
In 1866, Governor Andrew Curtin, a Bellefonte native, signed into law an act that named James Worrall Pennsylvania’s first Commissioner of Fisheries. That makes it the second-oldest fish and wildlife agency in the nation.
“We’re proud of that heritage and we celebrate it,” exclaims Arway.
It would be 1925 before legislation established the Board of Fish Commissioners and 24 more years until the Pennsylvania Fish Commission was so named, with Charles A. French named its first executive director. In the 1970s, reptiles and amphibians were added to the wildlife the fish commission was authorized to protect. Boating regulation and recreational opportunities were added into the organization’s purview in 1991 as it became the Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission. A history of the PFBC will be published in July.
“We’ve evolved from a one-man operation funded solely by the state’s general fund to being funded by license sales, registration fees, and the excise tax on sport fishing equipment,” notes Arway. “We’re very proud to say that we balance our budget every year. We’ve been called the most efficient fish and wildlife agency in the country in the way we spend angler dollars by the Legislative Budget and Finance Committee.”
Today, a full complement of PFBC personnel numbers about 432, though the current state budget cuts have it down to 380. The organization’s mission is still focused on “protecting, conserving, and enhancing our aquatic resources and providing fishing and boating opportunities.” A 10-member governing board oversees the operation and hires the director.
“We have a conservation- and a recreation-oriented mission,” says Arway. “We try to conserve the resources so that people can enjoy them and at the same time we produce recreation in some waters that can’t otherwise support fish themselves. About 70 percent of our licensed anglers, a little over 700,000, enjoy fishing for trout.”
Arway, a Pitt grad who did his graduate-school studies at Tennessee Tech and is a fisheries biologist by training, started working with PFBC in 1980 and became director in 2010. He lived in State College for 30 years before moving to Harrisburg, and he still has a house along Fishing Creek in Clinton County. An avid fisherman, he considers Spring Creek, Penns Creek, and Little Juniata his home waters to fish and Foster Joseph Sayers Reservoir at Bald Eagle State Park in Centre County his home lake.
“The Centre Region is the heart of our fish-culture operation,” he says.
High praise
Lots of fisher folk around these parts no doubt appreciate the work PFBC has done through the years and continues to do. One in particular — a very special one — sure does.
“The efforts by the fish commission to improve water quality is so important for fishing,” says legendary local fly fisherman and Pennsylvania fishing ambassador-at-large Joe Humphreys. “And John Arway, the executive director, has done a wonderful job with the fish commission. He’s a fly fisherman himself. He understands what we need, and he’s done a heck of a job.”
Humphreys, an Oak Hall resident, is now a spry 87 and still as graceful a wrist-flicker with a rod as ever. Typically wearing a Penn State cap on the water, he has had a legendary fishing life. He directed Penn State’s angling program for 19 years beginning in the 1970s. His storied career includes starting the State College-based Spring Creek chapter of Trout Unlimited in 1974; writing two classic fly-fishing books; hosting arguably the first national TV program on fly-fishing for ESPN during the 1980s; fishing in four world championships as a member of the US Fly Fishing Team; and being sought out as a fishing guide by the likes of former US President Jimmy Carter, former Vice President Dick Cheney, Hollywood star Liam Neeson, and many others.
If all that weren’t enough, he is scheduled to compete in the International Sport Fly Fishing Federation Masters World Championships in June in Galway, Ireland, and a former Penn State student of his is currently working with his wife on a documentary of him called Live the Stream.
Given his love of trout fishing, it’s no surprise Humphreys is especially appreciative of PFBC’s fish-stocking activities.
“The thing I so appreciate about the fish commission is that they stocked [the waterways with fish] for many years once the water quality started to change,” he says. “At one time on Spring Crick (as he pronounces it) there was nothing but brook trout. The water had started to warm up. There was no longer the habitat for the brook trout like there had been, so the fish commission supplemented it with some brown trout and some rainbow trout. The brown trout held and reproduced, so the hatcheries continued to stock, and many streams gave a heck of a lot of people an awful lot of pleasure.”
Fish hatchery finesse
“One of the primary ways PFBC meets both its conservation mandate and its mandate for the promotion of recreational fishing is through the state’s fish hatcheries,” says Shiels. He notes that of the state’s 14 hatcheries, eight are totally or mostly trout, and half of those are in or just outside of Centre County. The state fish hatcheries in Centre County include ones in Bellefonte, on Spring Creek by the Fisherman’s Paradise fishing area; Benner Spring; and Pleasant Gap. The Tylersville Hatchery is just north of Centre County in Clinton County.
All eight of these hatcheries produce more than 3 million adult trout for stocking each year, according to Shiels. The Pleasant Gap hatchery alone produces about 450,000.
Shiels is a Penn State grad who has been working with the agency for 30 years, as a biologist at first and then in higher managerial positions. He lives in Julian and loves to fish.
“Centre County has Spring Creek, one of the top wild trout streams in Pennsylvania,” he says. “That creek gets a lot of use around Bellefonte and State College and still is able to support an incredible wild trout fishery. People come from all over to fish Spring Creek. It’s an example of how water-quality protection and community support can support good wild trout in the midst of a growing community.”
He also offers the west branch of the Susquehanna River, close to Clearfield, as a great success story that’s close to State College
“As recently as a couple of years ago, that part of it that flows through town has become healthy enough to receive stock trout,” he says. “Areas of the upper west branch Susquehanna River, where it’s more like a trout stream you could jump across, have wild trout in them, and parts as you get closer to Clearfield have been cleaned up such that wild trout are reinhabiting areas where there weren’t trout for more than 100 years.”
Centre County’s Poe Lake is stocked with trout, and the county also is listed as having “best fishing waters” for common carp. PFBC stocks more than 10 million warm- and cold-water fish around the state to supplement natural fish populations, including walleye, muskie, bass, panfish, and other species.
Flowing into the future
Arway says that PFBC recently secured a contract with the Penn State Smeal College of Business to do a business analysis of the agency, even though, as a government agency, it doesn’t operate like a typical business enterprise. Part of the business analysis PFBC is doing, according to Arway, is to look at trends among anglers and to incorporate a new initiative called R3 (Recruitment, Retention, and Reactivation).
Another way PFBC is trying to attract even more people to fishing in Pennsylvania is through its Mentored Youth Fishing Program.
“We’re really excited about this,” says Arway. “The idea is for youths to take adults fishing, their mentors fishing, on a special day of the year. We started this three years ago, and it’s grown from several thousand kids to over 30,000. We hope to double the number of participants this year.”
With those numbers, it appears as if one of Pennsylvania’s favorite pastimes has a sound future to go with its burgeoning present.
“We have people coming here to fish from all over the United States because now we have about five great trout streams, like Penns Creek, Fisher Creek, Spring Creek, Big Bald Eagle, and the Little Juniata,” says Humphreys. “My God! We have such great waters in about a 30-mile radius! People come here, get a room, there’s food, there’s gas, equipment — they’re dropping a lot of cash. It’s big business.”
