Utah division of wildlife resources

[doitall5000]

I've been getting the fishing reports for a lot of years on my phone. Broke down by regions. Was very nice and helpful when looking for reports about good fishing places..  

Did you, who have been getting it see the change?
Was upto date reports of good news and hot fishing reports. It now  is fishing "forecast" for regions. Not much help....

[Cowboypirate]

Yes, I am disappointed at the change. Seems a generalized forecast is a pretty poor fishing report.

I wonder if it was a cost reduction kind of thing or if they don't have anyone to do the work to gather up to date info? If so, have them call me. I am happy to get paid to fish and write

[Kent]

Email I sent to Alan Ward, on June 11th:

“Hi Alan,
I used to enjoy reading the weekly fishing reports from the UDWR. The reports provided fairly-recent reports on many of the bodies of water. These days, one is provided with forecasts, instead of reports on essentially all of the bodies of water (including Strawberry). Is this what we will continue receiving, going forward?

Thanks,
Kent”

His reply:

“Kent,

I spoke with Mike Packer (included on this email) about this, and yes, there has been a general change in direction on how we handle these reports/forecasts. Many of our outreach staff were spending a large portion of their time trying to compile recent reports each week for dozens of water bodies to include in these reports. These staff members were directed from above to reduce this effort on many bodies of water, and replace this information with a "typical" forecast, unless something new comes up that needs to be brought to people's attention. However, there are still some of the more high profile bodies of water (such as Strawberry) where they are going to try and update things more frequently with increased information.

It also sounds like there have been some "growing pains" with this process, and we will be working with Mike soon to get the forecasts beefed up for Strawberry, and will try and assist him in getting some additional timely reports and suggestions based on what we are seeing. I hope I am not overstepping my bounds with my opinion, and hopefully Mike will step in and correct me if I am wrong, but trying to find recent reports for many of our smaller bodies of water would likely be a difficult task to keep up on. I am guessing that our outreach people are probably perusing all of the public fishing forums, facebook pages, etc. to try and glean any information that they can, and even with that it would be difficult to find enough information to keep things fresh. Our biologists are not out to all of these bodies of water frequently enough to know what is going on all the time. Therefore, the effort to find recent reports on many of these waters may not be warranted or even that useful at times.

Bottom line: It has changed, and we are all trying to figure out how to make it work so that our outreach people can spend less of their time trying to track all of this information down, but still try and provide something that is useful. Sounds like a tricky balance to me, but we will try to help them where we can for Strawberry, and I know that Mike wants this to be beneficial for the public elsewhere as well, obviously within the guidelines that Mike has been given from our administration.

We will keep working at it. Thanks for the email.

Alan Ward
Strawberry Project Leader
Utah Division of Wildlife Resources”

My reply:

“Alan,

It is totally understandable why the change has taken place. Hopefully, not having to spend time researching and providing reports frees up time that can be better spent doing more-productive projects. I have noticed that for some weeks Strawberry is not even mentioned in the reports. If there is one body of water that current information could be fairly-easily provided it would be Strawberry. (On a side note, because I am reading reports on various fishing forums, I am already current on what is happening at Strawberry, but I'm confident that some others rely more heavily on the weekly reports from the UDWR.)

Providing the same forecast for nearly all of the bodies of water, in a region, I find of minimal value. Perhaps a happy medium can be reached.

Thanks again,

Kent”

Alan’s reply:

“Thanks again Kent. I will try to work with them a little to hopefully keep the information as current as possible.”

Message from Michael Packer:

“Hi Kent,

Thank you for the feedback and understanding regarding DWR Fishing Forecasts.
I agree that Strawberry report frequency needs improvement. As the individual responsible for / tasked with providing and updating central region fishing forecasts, I'll improve these efforts.
I also agree with you that, community fisheries aside, having the same forecast for multiple fisheries in a region yields little value.
I'll work with our regional sportfish biologists to see if we can make improvements and reach a happy medium.

My contact information is below - please reach out if you have any questions or concerns about other central region fishing forecasts, or if you have a fishing report you'd like to share with the public / have included in our fishing forecasts.

Best,”

I have seen no improvement in the reports, thus far, but hopefully, they are improved, at least a little.

[gofish435]

I understand that putting together a fishing forecast is very time consuming and for the most part the outreach guys rely on the CO's and biologists to provide them with current information.  The problem is if the information is not current, it's not much help.
  
Whenever I go fishing I always provide the outreach person in the region that I fish, a report of my trip.  I could provide a list of those contacts if other anglers would like to provide their own fishing reports.  I know from experience that the DWR is appreciative of any information they receive.  
For the most part, fisherman are a secretive bunch and like to keep everything to themselves.

If you think Utah's fishing forecast is lacking just look to our north to Idaho and their fishing reports.  They publish the stocking report for their fishing forecast, talk about lame.

[catchinon]

As Kent alluded, there are many other places to seek out fishing reports. One of the best is Big Fish Tackle . There have been complaints in the past that the DWR often simply lifted reports from here. I have complained in the past that the reports weren't updated often enough but I understood that it was a huge project. Just my 2-cents worth.

[SkunkedAgain]

Seems to me if they have a current report they should publish them and skip all the other areas that don't have info... Would make their reports short and useful... Then point folks looking for reports on other locations to the forums where quite often they will be able to find someone that can share something to help them out... I'd prefer useful or no info myself, the projections are simply a waste of time... Just my take on it... I used to read those emails closely, anymore I just delete them... Later J