Thank you for that explanation.
As I am new to this, I have read a lot of the threads to try to catch up. Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that the requirement for fishing barbless in Alberta has been around for many years, or am I mistaken? I read somewhere that it was implemented in 2002 or 2003 but am not sure. I also read somewhere that Alberta has a lot of fisherman, around 800 thousand (I think that was from the SRD website) but only 800 fishable bodies of what... most of which are struggling, have no fish in them, or have what the biologist refer to as low recruitment (what the “H” is that)... the long and the short of it is that our lakes and the fish in them are struggling. I am new to fishing but I think that removing a hook from a fish is a whole lot easier on the fish when the hook is barbless, please correct me if I am wrong. It also seems to me that the avid fishermen, much like the ones who share their comments on here, should be extremely concerned about the condition of our lakes and want to do everything possible to ensure that new fisherman such as myself actually have a fish to catch and eventually release.
I think the law has been in place long enough that the fisherman of Alberta, especially the avid ones, should know the law, understand the law, know how to comply with the law and respect that law, regardless of whether they agree with the law or not...
Some of the comments was that the “Dink”, referring to an officer who was there to ensure that your fish were being given the respect that they deserve, was having a ****y day or was on a power trip… there was also a comment that he had written several tickets for barbed hooks that day… what does that say about the type of respect that the so-called avid fishermen have for the fish they covet so dearly? If we care about the fish as much as we claim, wouldn’t we have a ****y day too if we found out that nobody was respecting our fish I am just curious…
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