New 2019 Fishing Regs out
 

I see the Admin has a new sticky at the top.:sHa_shakeshout:

Thanks for posting Admin!

What a surprise, even more reductions in limits...

Just get it over with and make it all C&R. That is clearly what the bios/politicians want...

I cant wait to hear all the uproar with the new regs. People are going to lose their minds.

Has anyone looked at the Walleye Draws? Just throwing that one out there...

Looks like nothing has changed, 20 years of walleye closures and they're still closing more. None have reopened. Seems they need to change their game plan a bit.

Before reintroducing walleye to Lac La Biche there were tons of perch, big pike and no walleye. Now There are walleye non retention, No Perch and the Pike well they're disappearing now too and you can no longer retain any. You tell me... is it the fisherman causing the problem or the walleye?

I've given up on the idea of keeping any fish in this province , I love fishing and have contented myself with C+R here . I absolutely refuse to buy a tag for a walleye. That is an absurd proposition as far as I am concerned.It's cheaper to go to the store and buy a fish if I really feel the need to eat one after a day of throwing em back.
I am well aware that Alberta suffers from a lack of fish-able lakes per fisher but it also suffers from a long history of mismanagement when it comes to .... well almost everything to do with natural resources . Let's be honest here, the powers that be have and continue to screw this province up royally when it comes to sport fishing and hunting because they are incapable of looking at anything without dollar signs in their eyes

Well scratch N. Wabasca off your books. :sign0176:

Won't waste my breath on the topic. Just gotta flip open the photo album from the mid to late eighties to see the wicked perch and big pike we caught at will back then. Strangely enough very few walleye even tho they were fair game. I guess those 63 and a half centimeter first time spawner pike didn't quite produce like the 10 to 20 lb beauty hens that knew how to spawn instinctively during low water years to sustain a population for decades or centuries. Dumb fishermen don't know nothing. Neither do the guys calling the shots in saskie or manitoba. Kill all your brood stock off plus the winter kill plus the algae plus the dropping water levels and make dam sure you don't stock a single fish to make up for bad year classes in a province with too many fishermen and not enough water to begin with. Just keep pouring and protecting the worst predator fish of them all into these downtrodden lakes at the worst possible time to get your 10 bux back that they never should have bothered with if they woulda done a little research to see the impact 10 million wallies, protected from day one would have on an already hopeless situation.

I bet, in 10 years it will be only C+R within 300km of any city with 50k+ population.

Costco had some really good walleye (they call them pickerel) fillets in last week. $22 bought 2 meals for me and my lady friend and still a nice chunk left in the freezer for later. No hangups about not actually having caught them.

I will keep some rainbows from an ice fishing trip but otherwise it's catch and release for me. Live with it or take up gardening!

Interesting info here...online consultation survey results:
https://talkaep.alberta.ca/7036/docu...14122/download

And lake survey reports here:
http://aep.alberta.ca/fish-wildlife/...s/default.aspx

Looks like N. Wabasca needs to recover, but I bet it won’t take long...

I guess I’m a glass half-full guy. If you would have told me 20+ years ago that I could catch more than 10 decent lakers at Cold Lake in a day, or have a fish-full day on Lac Ste. Anne, I wouldn’t have believed it. That’s not mismanagement of fish, it’s mismangement of perspective and expectations. It’s easy to forget how bad the fishing was in the 90s.

Plus, now we also have some tiger trout.

That said, I do think it’s about time to focus on making perch fishing great again...

I feel sorry for my young kids, as I have been hunting and fishing my whole life. However, every year when you look at the regulations and see what is actually allowed to be retained it is getting harder and harder to get the energy to go fishing. Lately I feel like my money is either better spent on other things or kept in my account. Alberta fisheries is a joke.

should of switched la biche closed pike and open up for 1 walleye. That poor town economically is hurting. Plus it would improve the pike and perch populations. just my 2 cents

Yeah I'm ok with some of the pike closures as I've seen what can happen in a few lakes I fish that have been 0 pike retention for a while.....but in the same breath closing pike and not opening walleye general in lakes like LLB and pinehurst is not going to help. I also think a slot size for pike would help a ton....like 50-70cm.

Saskatchewan gonna get er this summer. I wonder if they gonna cut limits back on the western side where us albertans are heading.

There already are reduced limits in MLPP

New regs look good to me! Idk what the issues are haha

This seems to be the only positive change they have made this year. But then again it took what 4 years to come into effect.
.

Actually it looks like all of Pigeon Lake including tributaries and outlet is now open as well.

Why does fishing = retention? I have always been a firm believer that the fun is in the catching, not the keeping. I love the challenge of trying to a) Find the fish, and b) Get the fish to bite.

If I can let a fish go to get even bigger for someone else to catch, that's the best thing. I do not understand this mentality of needing to keep fish...

I have friends that feel this way as well. I usually dont take home fish, when i do its just enough for dinner for that night or two nights. I have friends that refuse to fish unless they get to keep it.

Looks like they lowered burbot limits?

2 fish max.

It looks like the burbot thing is lake specific.

Friend refused to do a fun derby with us a couple years ago (in support of charity!!!) because he couldn't keep fish. I absolutely can't stand that mentality. Don't get me wrong...if someone really wants to keep a couple walleye (within regs) for a fish fry, and they're the perfect eater size, then that's awesome. But I really don't fish for that reason, and don't see why anyone would...

I couldn't find anything on tiger trout and Pigeon Lake, am I missing something?

Hunting and trapping is retention. Hunting and fishing is the same thing in my mind. You have an opinion and that's fine. I won't go fishing unless there is some incentive to take something home. I have no desire to harm fish otherwise. The mentality you speak of comes from our inner desire to take responsibility for our own food. You release em' and I'll eat em':).

Fishing with no intention of eating any is kind of sadistic.

Seriously? Learn that one from PETA?

There are multiple studies indicating that fish either feel no pain or don't even have the capability to feel pain.

Handle them correctly and C&R mortality is next to zero.

Guess I'm sadistic.. :snapoutofit:

Kind of sadistic.

They are for eating. Ask any good native fella...that fish you caught is a gift to enhance your diet and keep you alive. Throwing them back is an insult. I love to eat fish and I don't care if they are 12 inches long or 40 lbs I enjoy every scrap. I don't fill my freezer or stockpile fish because I work for a living and don't fish 5 days a week. When I go out I go fishing with fresh supper in mind. That's the best part of it for me. Not throwing a skinny bleeding fish back with his mouth ripped apart from being handled too many times by guys that don't care. If the fisheries had been managed properly in the first place It wouldn't have come to this.

I agree that harvesting fish is a good thing. Good on you. But conservation needs to come first. There’s many, many of us who want to fish, and for a variety of reasons. Collapsing and losing fisheries is a bigger insult, more like a crime. For Alberta’s fisheries to be managed properly, even in the ‘first place’, there has to be pretty severe restrictions on how many adult fish any of us can kill each year. Our native trout are endangered, so we can’t keep any of them. So are grayling and sturgeon, if anyone would want to eat them anyway. That leaves stocked trout ponds and a few hundred lakes with walleye and/or pike, perch, whitefish. Of that small number, I suspect less than half, a result of paved roads and good boat launches and campgrounds, absorb most of the pressure. I think the bottom line is that until we accept a way to either restrict the number of folks who can fish a lake in a year, or come up with a way to share a fish between more than one person, we’ll have to deal with not being able to harvest a fish every trip.

Collapsing fisheries is easy. We’ve proved that repeatedly. Keeping fish around for tomorrow is harder.

Well if you think about it PETA has more ammunition if fishing is only catch and release for sport. Then it serves no practical function than to torture animals is how it can easily be viewed.

I think C&R mortality is a bit more than zero. It is quite a bit higher than most people think. If it wasn't fisheries wouldn't factor it into their conservation measurements. You mentioned handling, but that would only be one factor. Other considerations are water temperature, dissolved oxygen, depth fish was caught or recently ascended from, location of impalement, use of bait, bleeding, freezing and more.

I catch an release, but I like eating fish too. I'm more concerned about the current practice of protecting Apex predators while the rest of the pyramid collapses. That's poor management.