How would you rank 2012 spec trout season?

[Duck Butter]

I agree that there are lots of politics involved and the oil/corexit is easy to place blame on for lack of fishing success by certain areas this year. Fish can get out of polluted areas and swim further into the marsh/bay or wherever, the problem is that their eggs and larvae can not, we may be missing entire age classes of fish and crabs and shrimp, all the way down the food chain. The brown shrimp season that just closed was the worst in 24 years (blame it on oil? who knows). I listened to Secretary Barham say this and he is very adamant about not settling with BP right away because the effects may be well drawn out for many years. He is not mad at them, but wants them to make it right. LDWF can not speak openly about other facets, the lawyers have issued a gag order, he wanted so bad to tell the facts about what he has seen these last 2 years related to our fisheries but was not allowed to. He did say we will be seeing many more negative effects for years to come. Alaska once had a thriving herring fishery before the Valdez oil spill, now you can not catch enough to warrant fishing for them (I know its a completely different system and we have oil eating bacteria blah blah). Their is still a considerable amount of oil in our marshes, Sec Barham went out and personally went into a marsh that was declared 'safe' and stuck a jar in the mud and pulled up oil and mud. Their are studies (I will find the link later) just published about the effects of Corexit on the food chain and its horrible, they used the same concentrations that were found in the water after the spill and the results are not good for us.

As far as the lack of trout, I don't believe that, I think they are further up in the bays and marsh because they can get out the way of polluted water, its that the trout need good places to spawn and may not find them in that type of system.