Theoretical question on slot limit fish. You’re trolling and one that’s 1” under the slot hammers your plug. You get him to the boat and measure him, when doing so you realize he’s bleeding like a stick pig and you ripped two of his gills when you set the hook after he inhaled the bait. He ain’t going to make it, not a chance. Is the right thing to do to toss him overboard to become a floater or count him toward your limit and discreetly filet him back home and enjoy eating him?
I know what the right thing to do is to my mind and I’m a big proponent of C&R.
It pains me but I throw back all undersize floaters. Fish cops around here would write you up for sure. Who needs that hassle? Not worth it to me.
Just another instance of what's legal isn't necessarily what's moral. I hated to unhook Canary's off the coast just to watch them turn into Seagull food, but who needed the grief from the possum sheriffs. At least now you can keep 'em. Mostly...
You guys know that’s a very common excuse when somebody wants to keep an undersized fish or ten.
Sure I get what you’re saying and cheaters are always going to cheat. But say I kill 5 sub legal fish in my quest for my 10 fish limit, wouldn’t it make more sense to eat them and count them against my limit than to toss them and kill 15 that day instead of just the 10 fish limit.
Going back probably 15 plus years now, the Wardens stopped a couple guys leaving the north Maine woods with a few hundred small brook trout in their possession. I think they’d only been there two days, three at the most. They’d been fishing some of the smaller brooks and rivers in the area. You know the hurting a couple guys with a can of worms can do to to a small stream full of wild brookies? Takes quite a while to recover from that. Do it long enough to the wrong stream and it may not recover at all.
Yes some regulations seem arbitrary. But if you don’t think you can hurt a fragile eco system by taking too many fish, you might want to read up on the subject. Some guys think of rivers and streams like a magicians hat. You can just take as much as you want and there’s always more where that came from. Doesn’t work like that.
