Catch and Release –
Management by Slogan?
If you have spent more than a few hours fishing these Potter County streams you will undoubtedly, sooner or later, be asked if you are a “catch and release” fisher. The questioner will not necessarily be another fisherman, but usually someone who gave it up years ago or has never wetted a line. This “act” of public surveillance is a great testament to the power of modern marketing - it seems, everyone is an agent, an expert on the subject. Indeed, government agencies, tackle manufacturers and outfitters all go out of their way to expound on the virtues of the practice. It is, well let’s face it, a wonderful way to make everyone from the most rabid tree-hugger to the counter man at the local hardware store “feel good.”
As generally understood by the non-fishing public it means we will always have plenty of fish because none of them get killed. Right?
Wrong. Dead wrong (no pun intended). From the Fishing Log: I’d arrived early for some evening-hatch fishing on a stretch of the Lower Allegheny River this spring. To kill some time I decided to walk upstream to a pool I knew to have been heavily loaded with hatchery trout a few days previously. Sure enough, the surface was alive with rising trout, perhaps as many as a dozen rising simultaneously.
In a dozen or so casts I had caught a dozen or so fish – brooks, rainbows and a couple of browns – all of the standard hatchery trout size, from 9 inches to about 12 or 13”. Great fun? Not really, and I quickly tired of the exercise. It was, in effect, non- Fish Commission designated catch and release fishing, i.e., voluntary; the end result of years of Fish Commission and other marketing propaganda. Good for me! Right?
Wrong. The real story is that at least two of the fish were gut hooked. A gut hooked fish stands about as much chance of living out a normal life as a deer hit by a lumber truck on the highway. Very, very slim, as any puncture of a trout’s skin invites the invasion of untold numbers of ghastly parasites and other infections present in all trout waters.
Why were they gut hooked? A typical hatchery raceway may hold 10,000 trout. This leads to intense competition for food, hook-less food at that. Place large numbers these same trout into a pool and the same strong-arm tactics continue with the result that they become entangled in the leader or overshoot the mark or otherwise impale themselves.
Catch
and Release Box Score:
12 trout caught, 12 trout released. Success Rate: 100% (Perfect)
Real
Box Score:
12 trout caught, 2 trout killed. Success rate: 84% (16% mortality)
Keep in mind that the above incident happened voluntarily. I could have harvested the two unfortunates, but frankly I don’t care much for the taste of stocked trout. Had it happened on a wild trout stream, I probably would have killed and eaten the two unfortunates. “Waste not, want not” (remember? – another old slogan from another time when subsistence was a way of life).
You say: “But, that was just an isolated experience. Certainly it can’t be all that pervasive.” Wrong. All trout, wild (especially the young) or stocked are vulnerable to this phenomenon. My experience has been that it can happen anytime, on any stream and under even the most ideal conditions. No fisherman worth his or her salt likes gut hooking. Also, keep in mind that what happened had nothing to do with my ability to extract a hook from a properly hooked fish’s mouth, my playing the fish to exhaustion, my rough handling of the trout, or other factors. It just plain happened! Numerous studies by agencies (including our own Fish Commission) and others have documented that a certain level of mortality will always occur as a result of catch and release fishing. And those mortality figures sky rocket when the fisherman doesn’t know and practice good C&R techniques.
While this bit of information might give pause to the laymen advocates of C &R (the one’s who don’t fish, meaning the one’s who don’t actually have to deal with the moral and societal demands C&R incurs), it pales in significance to what happens on mandated Catch and Release waters. Waters where the fisherman has no choice but to return fish. On these waters mortality rates can reach 30 per cent.
Is it a problem there? Type “catch and release” into Google and check the hit count - 1,840,000. (While perhaps as many as half of these hits relate to Bush’s bungled Mexican border plans and a movie, it’s still a lot of hits). Why?Because, even though it can be a successful tool in maintaining quality wild fisheries, it can also lead to some “unintended consequences.” High on the list of these is angler dissatisfaction due to trout deformities or injuries resulting from repeated hooking, which in turn has lead to an overall dissatisfaction with the angling experience on these waters. This translates into less money into the state and local license tills and outfitter bank accounts. Which, in turn, leads to more grant-writing and study of the problem, which leads to even more information on the web.
One would think that in stocked water where C&R is the rule that everything would be just hunky dory. After all, if trout numbers get low, just back up the truck and dump in some more. The most pronounced side effect of these programs is that they often are established on streams that already have demonstrated an ability to sustain a wild trout population (our own Upper Allegheny River DH project with limited harvest after June 15, for example). It should be pointed out that this project was the result of a political compromise, not a biologically sound assessment of the stream or the possible side effects.
The owner, because he respected and liked his neighbors and didn’t want to post, would have preferred no stocking with open access; the Fish Commission insisted on stocking because they’d always stocked. The DHP program came as close as anything in the hopper at that time and it was implemented. The then FC slogan, Resource First has since been quietly dropped.
So what happens? The regs are promulgated, the signs are put up, the fishermen arrive, the fishermen practice C&R. Everyone has fun – lots of trout are caught, all of the trout are released. Everyone feels good. Three years later not a single wild trout can be found in that stretch of the river (my observation). In addition to overcrowding to begin with, it is inevitable that all those fishermen with all those hours of carefree angling will have hooked (and possibly mortally damaged) the few wild trout repeatedly to the point where they are wiped out. Ah, but it’s Catch and Release so it’s OK. Fundamentally this flies in the face of the agency mantra that they are in the business of promoting and protecting aquatic habitats and fisheries.
Catch
and Release wild rainbow from an Alaskan fishery. Note
missing eye.
More of these pictures at http://www.absc.usgs.gov/research/Fisheries/Alagnak/catch_and_release.htm
The arguments for and against Catch & Release fishing are mostly irrelevant. Historically, with the exception of certain periods of exploitation under specific circumstances, most responsible fisherman have always practiced it. Gone are the days when the lumber camp cook tossed a stick of dynamite into the stream to efficiently kill off 40 or 50 brook trout to feed the hungry lumberjacks. (Also gone, by the way, is the very same productive stream as a result of the lumbering). Even commercial fishermen sooner or later come to their senses – one simply can’t continue to harvest unregulated numbers of fish and expect them to be there forever.
I, personally, prefer the other slogan: “Limit your catch, don’t catch your limit.” I probably have caught well over 400 trout this year. I’ve kept about a dozen. These I either eat myself, or give to others who I know will appreciate them. And these have all been wild trout, except one. Listed below are my rules for C&R:
1.
Plan
you trip.
It helps a lot to ask yourself right up front whether or not you
intend
to “keep anything.” Check the freezer,
think about your meal planning, perhaps you do owe someone a
favor of
trout. In other words…decide ahead of
time. And be prepared for the moment on
stream when you will have to make a quick decision.
2. Use heaviest leader possible under the circumstances so that you can play the fish in the shortest amount of time. Long battles produce body chemistry changes in trout that often kill them.
3. Unhook the trout in the water if at all possible. Easy to say, not always so easy to do. Use pliers or hemostat to gently, but smartly, extract hook. Desperate to get him back into the water? Cut the line (You certainly have more flies, don’t you?).
4. Use barbless or small barbed hooks, or bend down barbs with pliers. You’ll lose a few more, but what’s the difference…it’s C&R.
5. If you must lift the trout from water, first wet your hands. That’s easy, but now the trout is really slippery. Try grasping it behind the gills (never, never get your hand or fingers into the gills) and lift and turn so that it is upside down. This often settles a squiggly trout so that you can examine the hook up and get the hook out quickly. Again, if you see blood in the mouth, tongue or throat – cut the line, leave the hook and quickly get him back into the water. Bleeding is the worst possible sign. Even the Fish Commission suggests keeping the bleeders, regulations permitting (page 45, current 2006 Pennsylvania Fishing Summary, free at all outfitters).
6.
Show some restraint.
You might be able to catch 100 fish in a day at a managed
refuge, but
that doesn’t mean all will survive when released (indeed, perhaps as
many as 20
will die). In fact your
mortality rate will probably be higher than if you had only showed up
to get a
fish or two for the pan.
7.
The ultimate
solution to no-kill is to simply
cut the bend of the hook off with a pair of side-cutting pliers. You get to go fishing, you get to enjoy the
scenery, you get to enjoy the satisfaction of locating and bringing up
trout. Your daily creel is the number
of strikes. Impossible?
I have done it on occasion. Usually
to test a new line, or a different
leader design, fly pattern, to practice casting or what have you. You can fish ‘til the cows come home and not
have to give a damn about C&R (or much else, for that matter). Will it ever become popular?
No.
But it illustrates the point.
For
the diehard C&R freako, tree-huggin, soccer-mommy-eco-specialists
there is
a better and simpler, harmless and readily available solution to the
C&R
dilemma:
Computer Games!
And we worry why our young people no longer seem to be interested in the sport, the real sport. Heavens knows how many millions of people are blasted away each week in harmless (sic!) war games played by supine, overweight teens. Perhaps the byte jockeys have the answer after all.
I call these games Catch
and
Cache and they automatically keep track of your creel-kill
and you
can earn points, etc. Just like the
real thing. So clearly, the answer is
not Catch and Release, but C&C! Eh?
Not quite!
Some Further Reading:
http://www.absc.usgs.gov/research/Fisheries/Alagnak/catch_and_release.htm
http://www.fws.gov/Refuges/FishingGuide/catch_and_release.html
http://www.mnr.gov.on.ca/fishing/catrel.html
http://www.terragame.com/fishing/index_1_sort2.html
http://www.carpuniverse.com/frames_site_navigation_pages/virtual2.html
http://www.flysim.com/flysim/flysim_features.html
