State of the Nation...Fishing Related

[obifishkenobi]

You make good points, Obi. But the "put and take" fish are a limited resource. Hatcheries can only produce so many fish. Maybe a 2 fish limit could help: if twice as many anglers take home half as many fish, well, you do the math.

Personally, I do not mind fewer numbers of fish, one of the question they ask on angler surveys is would you like to catch more fish or larger fish, I lean on the side of catching larger fish. Fewer mouths to feed lead to larger fish. Also once a given body of water becomes more difficult for average anglers to find success, pressure will drop on that body of water, leaving it to more advanced anglers who are better at targeting the remaining larger fish. That being said I'm not apposed to changing rules and regulations to meet long term trends in our fisheries but, I think it is to soon to declare that our lakes and streams are fished out because of a once in a century pandemic. There was a post several weeks ago on the Idaho board complaining that all of the lakes in South East Idaho where fished out because of this past years increased pressure, based on this persons inability to catch fish through the ice this year. I responded to that post by saying that I  have had one of my best years ever in those same bodies of water, in both numbers and quality of fish caught. Fisheries are cyclical and always changing and to consistently catch fish you have to be willing to adapt to those changes, by changing tactics, species targeted or locations. An example of that for me is Willard, 5 years ago Wiper fishing was easy, I could count on catching 2-3 dozen wipers most trips and incidentally catching a few Walleye each year. Then the water came up, the shad population exploded and the DWR reduced the number of Wipers planted and increased the number of Walleye based on anglers desire to catch more walleye; all of these factors led to it being harder to catch big numbers of Wipers and made it easier to catch Walleye. I adapted, the last couple years I have been targeting Walleye and have good success while incidentally catching a few large Wipers.