HunterDave, you wrote the following: "I doubt it if you catch your 3 fish and go cook them up on the fire. But, if you have to catch and release 10 fish before catching one big legal to keep one then the potential for fish dying unnecessarily increases."
Please look at the previous studies you posted about hooking mortality. It talks about standard hooking (not gill or gut hooking) as having very low mortality rates. This is why a bait ban is in effect. Very few fish are hooked deep enough with non bait techniques, and as such there is very low mortality. For your situation of catching and releasing 10 fish before getting a keeper having a higher mortality rate than keeping the first three, you would need a mortality rate about 20% on the released fish. This simply is not going to happen when bait it not being used.
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