Trio of topics to mull

This column will touch on three topics. One has the potential for collegiate scholarships and even Olympic participation for some of our youth involved in the shooting sports. The second has statewide significance regarding the future management of our fisheries resources. The third item involves Gnarly Dan and company.

Starting at 5 p.m. today, the Alaska Scholastic Clay Target Program (ASCTP) will hold its state championships at Grouse Ridge Shooting Grounds north of Wasilla. Tonight, the 50-bird trap competition will be held, and tomorrow beginning at 10 a.m., a 100-bird walkthrough sporting clays event will be held. Lunch and awards will happen after the Saturday shooting.

This is a youth shotgun shooting program. I’ve mentioned the program before and an article about the Grouse Ridge Rangers participating in a major national shoot in Illinois appeared in this newspaper last August. Currently, 54 kids are scheduled to shoot in today’s Alaska state championship.

Neil Moss, the president of ASCTP and head coach of the Grouse Ridge Rangers shooting team, has been working hard along with other members of ASCTP to grow this program into a statewide opportunity for our young folks to earn college scholarships. Several shooters from SCTP programs across the country, in addition to the college scholarships, have gone on to both the Junior Olympics and Olympics shooting programs.

The SCTP is only a few years old in Alaska, but has been established in the Lower 48 for several years. Moss hopes the program will spread in Alaska and plans are in place this summer to establish shooting clubs all over the state. Areas that have potential are Fairbanks, Seward, Kenai, Valdez, Cordova, Southeast and some Bush locations. Participating kids have to maintain grades comparable to athletes in any high school sport and commit to a regular schedule of practice. If you would like more information on the program, call Neil Moss at 373-0961 or stop by Grouse Ridge tonight or tomorrow and watch the shooting and meet the kids and coaches.

The second topic involves the governor’s recent appointments to the Alaska Board of Fisheries. Three positions were coming open. The governor chose to reappoint two incumbents and replace one member. The two reappointments are Bill Brown from Juneau and John Jensen from Petersburg. The newcomer is Susan Jeffrey from Kodiak, who replaces Mel Morris, also from Kodiak.

I worked with both Brown and Jensen during my term on the board. I like them both and consider them friends. Brown brings a strong natural resource economics and statistics background with an interest in sportfishing to his seat. Jensen has been a commercial fisherman virtually his entire life. I don’t know Jeffrey, but her background includes commercial fishing, writing and editing fisheries oriented publications, and local government participation.

At the recently completed Upper Cook Inlet Board of Fisheries meeting, Jensen voted almost exclusively for commercial fisheries-supported proposals, even if those proposals would negatively impact some of the Cook Inlet salmon stocks Fish and Game was recommending as Stocks of Concern. Brown, on the other hand, put the resource first and took some heat for supporting some proposals that took fish away from users and allocated them into the “resource rebuilding” category.

That’s how things should be done in my opinion — protecting the resource comes first and then allocating the harvestable surplus among user groups as fairly as possible. However, that approach usually means everybody is mad at you by the end of the meeting. I’ve been there!

I was particularly pleased Brown was renominated. He has shown himself to be an ethical man with strong personal integrity and a deep concern for the well-being of our fisheries resources and for those who use these resources. One cannot ask any more than that for someone interested in such oftentimes thankless public service as the Board of Fisheries.

And finally, at long last, I got a chance to go icefishing! I met Gnarly Dan and two friends, Hey You and Ken, at an undisclosed stocked Valley lake earlier this week. I’ve changed the names, except Ken’s, to poke fun at the antics. Ken didn’t do anything offbeat, except catch the two largest fish, maybe the most fish and probably the last fish of the day. That’s not being goofy, just being a good fisherman.

Hey You is also an excellent and hardcore ice fisherman. When I asked him what nickname he would like, mainly to protect his reputation, he chose the aforementioned. I warned him that the trip could end up in the paper. I’m not sure he believed me.

I haven’t written a Gnarly Dan story for about a year-and-a-half and thought this might make a good opportunity. All of the previous Gnarly stories are loosely based on real situations and happenings, as far fetched as they may have sounded. However, I was just informed of the two items appearing earlier and I felt they needed to be mentioned, so the full version of this Gnarly Dan episode will have to wait for another day.

One item from the trip I just have to mention was Gnarly Dan’s “gift” for catching several of the smallest fish I’ve ever seen come through an icefishing hole. While we all went home with our limits of normal-sized fish, Gnarly caught and released almost another full limit of 3-inch whoppers. We’re still trying to figure out how those little guys were able to bite the hook.

Howard Delo is a retired fisheries biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. You can leave him a message by emailing sports@frontiersman.com.