So I took my wife up to prospect on Clear Creek in History Park near downtown Golden, this morning to check out that location and have some fun. It is a very pretty spot with shade, a place where the flow is nice, a big park and ball fields, a museum and oh yeah, rafters and yakkers.
Listen, I thought bicycle riders were rude and overbearing to pedestrians on the Clear Creek bike path... but they've got nothing on those kayakers (yakkers to me).
The sluice is setup about a foot and a half from the shoreline in about 4" of water where I had to use some big rocks to set up a little dam to control the water through the sluice box.
My wife is feeding the classified gravel into sluice and is sitting in a folding nylon chair with the back legs of the chair on dry land, the front legs in the water beside the sluice.
I go upstream about 25 yards and am digging under a boulder the size of a VW when I hear hear my wife yell ...HEY!
I look up and there is a yakker with the nose of his kayak headed straight for my wife and the sluice, he hits the rocks knocking them downstream that I had set up in front of the sluice for water control, and looks at her bewildered and says... "oh.... did I interfere with your... gold?" then took off downstream like a happy little yakker.
After that, there were a couple of other instances where I noticed a complete lack of respect or even acknowledgement of our being there and requiring our own space.
For the few hours we were there, group after group would just move in right on top of us, walk around in front of the sluice (a party foul for sure) and otherwise just kinda take over our space, meanwhile there is 20 miles of unoccupied shoreline in both directions.
So, if you go up to Historic Park in Golden on Clear Creek to prospect, I suggest taking a couple of rods and reels with a couple of bobbers... (no hooks) and put one out on each side of your sluice box and just let the bobbers hang out in the creek out there.
I'll betcha you won't have one single yakker try and drive his little plastic tub down your sluicebox like it was an obstacle course.
The fear of getting tangled in fishing line and the shear possibility that there might be a sharp hook dangling around out there will keep the Yakkers away, I promise.
Lovely advice. Some fishermen on the Afon (River) Mawddach here in Wales like to complain about gold panners killing salmon by disturbing the silt, which supposedly sticks in their gills. Total rubbish of course. The Yakkers have also been banned on the Mawddach, by the same fishermen, who kill the salmon which are now endangered. If they had any sense they would stop the fishermen killing the salmon, and encourage goldpanners, who actually improve the conditions for fish spawning. We clean up the gravels, and fish need clean gravels for spawning.
ReplyDeleteBrian Wright Treasurer Gold Rivers Trust