President's Letter

June 2008

Dear C.J.T.U. Members,

I hope everyone is enjoying this year’s fishing season, I know am. The water levels are looking good, the weather has been favorable and the fish have been biting. This time of the year gets a little quiet for us because most of our members are out on the water. Attendance at our meetings tends to be a little light, especially on good weather days. For our June meeting we encountered a problem with our scheduled speaker, so one of our members, Dave Hart, has agreed to put on a presentation on Bone Fishing in the Bahamas. Dave has done some presentations in the past for us and they are always top notch, so be sure to come out and join us on Tuesday, June 17th at the American Legion Hall. Remember our meeting date has changed this month! We will be meeting on the third Tuesday instead of the second Tuesday for this month’s (June) general meeting.

I will be looking for volunteers in the next few months to help out with various projects on the Musconetcong River. Brian Cowden, Trout Unlimited’s Musconetcong Home Rivers Initiative Coordinator, has several projects in the works and will be looking for volunteers. The work will include retrieving data from temperature monitors, help with sitting on a committee to oversee the 2009 Musky River Fest, general fund raising and a fund raising and outreach event on the river with our partners the Musky Watershed Association, riparian buffer plantings, cattle abatement projects to include fencing, riparian buffer plantings and some stream bank stabilization. This is only a partial list as he has quite a few other irons in the fire as well. I will provide more information on specific projects as it becomes available.

Central Jersey Trout Unlimited will have a presence at the Treasures of the South Branch Event on Saturday June 14th at the Red Mill in Clinton. The event celebrates the Treasures of the South Branch of the Raritan River and highlights the many positive attributes of the beautiful river that we all enjoy. So please add the event to you calendar and stop by and say hello.

Unfortunately our summer programs at the Pequest Hatchery are still up in the air. As soon as I learn for certain what the status of these programs are I will notify everyone on our mailing list. If your reading this your on our list!

Speaking of our mailing list, if you know a C.J.T.U. member that has not signed up for our new newsletter please encourage them to do so. Let them know that we will respect their privacy. E-mail addresses will not be shared with anyone! We will not be flooding inboxes with unwanted advertising. The only correspondence from us will be the monthly newsletter and perhaps a notice on a T.U. related concern if something comes up between editions of Main Stream that require immediate action. Tell them to visit our website http://www.cjtu.org/ and enter their e-mail address on our home page. That’s all there is to it! As an added incentive, anyone who provides us with an e-mail address will be automatically be entered in a free rod raffle. We will be collecting addresses through the spring and summer and we will select the lucky CJTU in the fall.

As a reminder, we do not have general meetings during the months of July and August. The general meetings will start up again in September (2nd Tuesday). Keep an eye on your inbox though, as I mentioned previously we have several projects in the works.

I’d like to close with a little fishing story. A few weeks ago I was noticing a lot of crane fly activity on my home water. This insect intrigued me so I did a little research. I learned that although the larva doesn’t actually live in the stream bottom they often find their way into the water column during rain events as the rising water erodes their bank habitat. A quick Internet search revealed dozens of patterns most of which were quite large, far too big to represent the larva form of the small yellow/orange adults I was seeing on the water. Then I came across a pattern called “Walt’s Worm”. In fact one site Rise Form Studio TV actually had a video tutorial for tying this pattern on their site. It is a simple pattern to tie, so easy in fact that my five-year-old son William, who recently took up fly tying, was able to tie me up a bunch. Here is a photo of a brown trout that was fooled by this simple pattern.

It’s a nice fish but what makes it special is that it was caught on one of the first flies tied by my son. He has a promising future as a fly tier!

As always, if anyone has a need to contact me I can be reached via e-mail at .

May 2008

I am pleased to announce that our electronic version of Main Stream is about to make its début. This will most likely be the last regular print addition of Main Stream you will receive in your mailbox. There may be special editions of the newsletter that we send out periodically, but it is our intention to rely on electronic media to get our message out. As previously discussed this decision is being driven by a financial need more than anything else. The rising costs of printing and postage have made it impossible to continue printing and mailing our newsletter. I encourage each and every one of our members to share their e-mail address with us. Be assured we will respect your privacy. Your e-mail address will not be shared with anyone! We will not be flooding your inbox with unwanted advertising. The only correspondence from us will be the monthly newsletter and perhaps a notice on a T.U. related concern if something comes up between editions of Main Stream that require immediate action.

Our Board of Directors have been working hard developing a feature rich format for the new electronic version of Main Stream. Part of this project also involves redesigning our website, which I am happy to say is underway. Now you will be able to view our newsletter as intended, in full color and if an article includes a link to a resource on the web you will be able to direct yourself to that link right from the article.

At this point some of you may be asking, how do I go about signing up for the new Main Stream? It’s easy, simply visit our website http://www.cjtu. org/ . On our home page you will see a box prominently displayed that reads “Sign up for our newsletter”. Just enter your e-mail address and hit the “go” button, that’s all there is to it. As an added incentive anyone who provides us with an e-mail address will be automatically entered into a free rod raffle. We will be collecting addresses through the spring and summer and we will select the lucky CJTU member when we launch the electronic version of Main Stream in the fall. So stay involved, stay informed and sign up for Main Stream today!

Obviously there is more going on than changes to the newsletter format. Last month we wrapped up our annual fundraising effort. We raised almost $5,000.00 through our raffle. I want to personally thank each and every one of you who supported your chapter by purchasing tickets.

C.J.T.U had a presence at the Pequest Open House at the end of March. Our members helped out with the kids fishing down at the pond and also demonstrated fly tying to the scores of folks that showed up over that weekend. We also participated in a clean-up of the Musconetcong River during the month of April. I don’t have the final numbers yet but I heard it was a successful outing. We will also be involved in the stocking of the Point Mountain section of the Musky. We will be out every Friday until the end of May assisting with the stocking of fish in that section of the river.

What’s happening in the future? In the fall we hope to be hosting a Kid’s Fishing day but that depends on what is going on with the hatchery. Budget cuts could affect our ability to utilize that facility. There will be a CJTU barbeque this fall. We are hammering out the details and should have some info for you in the weeks to come. That is about it for now. Take a break from fishing and come out to a meeting. As always, if anyone has a need to contact me I can be reached via e-mail at .

March 2008

Dear C.J.T.U. Members This will be one of the last paper MainStreams you will be receiving in the mail. Main Stream is not going away it is simply evolving. Due to the rising costs of printing and mailing it is no longer cost effective to print and mail Main Stream. It costs the chapter close to a thousand dollars each time we do a mailing. As a non-profit conservation organization, whose only source of income is through our fundraising efforts, I feel that money would be better spent protecting our cold-water fisheries. Not to mention that we will be further protecting our resources by reducing our dependence on paper to deliver our message. You have already been subject to some of the cost saving efforts we have tried in recent years. If you recall MainStream used to be delivered to your doorstep 10 times a year. During the last two years we reduced the number of newsletters you receive annually by half. Although this saved the chapter some money it also hurt us because we could no longer get information out to our members in a timely fashion.

In this day and age almost all of our members have an e-mail address or access to the Internet. If you’re like me the last thing you need is another piece of junk mail cluttering your inbox. I promise you will not consider our new electronic newsletter “junk mail”. At last, we will be able to deliver the full color, feature rich document that only Main Stream’s editors see. Currently our newsletter is delivered to you in black and white. With the electronic version you will be able to see the photos, the fly patterns, and everything else in full color. We will once again be able to produce a newsletter on a more regular basis ensuring that we get important information out to you in a timely fashion. Another added benefit will be the ability to hyperlink directly to the sources on the Internet that may be mentioned or quoted in a particular article.

Overall we have had overwhelming support for this endeavor, but I realize that there may be some that will be unhappy with this change. Unfortunately there is no way we can continue to produce a printed copy of Main Stream. I think that everyone will see that this change will be a step in the right direction. We will be able to deliver a more feature rich product, dramatically reduce our costs, and be able to apply the money saved directly to our conservation efforts. We are in the process of working out the details on exactly how we are going to collect the e-mail addresses of our members. As soon as we get it all figured out we will begin our campaign to reach out to each and every member to make sure you continue to receive your copy of our newslet ter. So please be on the look out for more information about this issue in the months to come.

As I mentioned previously, one of the reasons we are being forced to make these changes is because of the financial burden associated with the printing and mailing of MainStream. That being said this would be a good time to talk about our current fund raising event. Hopefully by now you have received your raffle tickets in the mail. This year we have dubbed our raffle the “Artisan Package”. CJTU members or supporters have made all of the items in this traditional bamboo fly-fishing outfit. Everyone should have received his or her tickets by now, but since we used a new method to put together our mailing list we may have missed a few of you. If that is the case you can purchase tickets out our general meeting or at the Open House at the Pequest Hatchery, where we will draw the lucky winner on Sunday March 30th. Please help support your chapter by participating in this year’s fund raising event!
Thank you in advance for your cooperation in helping MainStream complete this transition into the 21st Century. As always, if anyone has a need to contact me I can be reached via e-mail at .

Tight Lines !

Bart