Tuesday, April 21, 2009
DGIF lists Pandapas as private pond
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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Jim Pearman has put some time into tweaking his approach to catching big chain pickerel at Pandapas Pond.
That live bait approach paid off for Pearman a couple of years ago when he caught a citation pickerel from the pond. Last year, it really paid off for his daughter, Sarah.
"I was halfway around the pond when I heard her yell, 'Dad, I caught a big one,'" recalled Pearman, who ran back to the spot. "I figured it might be a 3- or 4-pounder."
He figured wrong.
When they finally found a set of certified scales a few hours later, the fish weighed 6 pounds, 13 ounces.
It turned out to be the largest chain pickerel registered with the Virginia Angler Recognition Program in 2008, earning a coveted Angler of the Year pin for Sarah, a 19-year-old nursing student.
There was just one glitch.
When Sarah received her certificate from the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, the location of her catch was listed as "Private Pond."
The citation Jim earned a couple years earlier had the same mistake.
While some anglers might actually be happy to be able to keep their hot spot somewhat of a secret, the Pearmans, who live in Radford, don't mind sharing. They're proud of the fact that they made their catches fishing a water open to the public.
So was Blacksburg angler Richard McClevey, who pulled a 5 pound, 7 ounce rainbow trout from Pandapas Pond on April 25, 2008.
That fish, like 1,073 of the 6,251 citations registered in 2008, was listed in the DGIF database as having been caught in a private pond.
McClevey pulled up the searchable awards database on the DGIF Web site -- a database we have posted in the Datasphere section at roanoke.com, too -- and noted that not a single fish was listed as having come from the little pond just outside Blacksburg.
Conspiracy theorists can rest easy. The cause was actually pretty simple.
According to Gary Martel, director of the DGIF's Fisheries department, when the data is entered from the written citation applications into the computer database, choices of the body of water are limited to those that are included in the agency's list of public streams, lakes and ponds.
If the water is not a recognized, the system defaults to "private pond" or "all other waters," the term the agency uses for waters that can't be classified.
While the list of recognized waters is pretty comprehensive, it's not perfect.
Several small ponds are on the list. But no doubt Pandapas Pond is not the only pond that is not.
Martel said he'll make sure that the agency's list of public waters is updated to include Pandapas Pond.
It seems to make sense that the agency should, at the very least, make sure that every water on the trout stocking plan is included.
Where it gets tricky is with ponds that are public but maybe too small or obscure to even have names. For example, borrow pits, mill ponds and apartment ponds. There's simply no accurate way to account for such waters, so many will have to remain obscure.
So, what impact does this glitch have on the overall trophy fish statistics from previous years?
Clearly, private ponds do not produce as many citation-sized fish as was assumed. But it's probably not a major difference.
Even if 100 to 200 of those private pond fish from 2008 actually came from small public waters, private ponds still are responsible for a high number of annual citations.
The other takeaway is that, while properly managed private ponds can produce some whoppers, little public waters are often worth checking out, too.
