Quote:
Originally Posted by CNP
I'm pretty much catch and eat but. I love fishing and all that it has to offer, which includes food for the table. I'll release fish that are small and/or record setting, or do not have any retention. If all fishing was catch and release I wouldn't participate in an activity that became purely all about the pursuit and nothing about the result. Just like many long established "traditions", that were hand down by our forefathers...catching fish and keeping them is now looked down upon by some. It's like you have to hang your head down when talking to catch and release only elitists. I used to fish the Crow/Castle regularly when there was some retention but I can't bring myself to fish the rivers now that there is zero retention even on non-native fish such as Browns and Rainbows. I'm on board with zero retention on endangered species such as Cutties and Bullys but to release a legal fish that appears to have life threatening injuries is just not ethical in my opinion.
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IMO the number that really needs to get tweaked
and enforced is posession limits. I think most of the healthy fisheries in AB can support a modest retention limit. What they have never been able to support is locals attempting to fill entire freezers with fish, people showing up for a week of camping and attempting to take home a month's worth of fish frys.
At the previously standard pike limit of 3 fish per person... I've got a family of four that likes eating fish, three legal-to-5lbish pike makes for two meals, which is about as much pike as anyone I know really cares to eat in a week anyways. Yet still I see familys limiting out all members day after day, and the fishing suffers as a result.
Determining and effectively enforcing sustainable posession limits would admittedly be tricky, but I think it would go a long ways towards preserving the angling tradition. My own policy has always been:
dont freeze fish, dont lent them spoil, and dont eat them to the point you are tired of fish. I'm not holding myself up as some moral authority, but I think if anglers in general had adopted such a policy when they first started telling us to "Limit our Catch", we wouldnt currently be forced into implementing C&R regs on so much of Alberta's waters.