Quote:
Originally Posted by bmercury
If I did happen to kill a baby shark for some reason I wouldn't pose for pictures.
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Yeah... well... posting pictures of small sharks definitely encourage others to take them because it makes it seem more commonplace or acceptable.
It's not about bragging but it's about cultivating a mentality. People do what they think it's cool to do. Right now some have convinced fisherman that there is nothing wrong with keeping small sharks. We just need to change that mentality because they (Tsharks) are so easy to target and over fish when they are small because they school up and often stick around in the same area for days or more close to shore.
Adults are harder to over fish because they are constantly on the move, so they are simply not as susceptible to overfishing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bmercury
I know that there are people out there that keep EVERYTHING. I have seen the way people look at you when you throw back anything that is legal to keep.
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There are people like that, but we are not all like that.
Most California fisherman learn ocean fishing on sportboats and sportboats have a interest in getting people to keep as many fish as possible. They are a business and they get business from advertising a high number of fish caught or high fish counts.
Once again it's about a mentality. If you think it's cool to kill as many fish as you can then that is what you do, and usually how you think about these things depends on where you learned to fish.
This last year do to the slow tuna season landings were really hurting for business so some really played up the local Sandbass fishing. For a while some landings were posting counts of 6000 bass a day during the spawn. They don't post catch and release numbers, they post fish killed and as far as they are concerned the more the better because big numbers mean lots of guys on their boats.
Now look at the larger picture. This was going on right during the last year of the MLPA debate right in the middle of arguments about inshore fishing and what the enviros want closed in the name of "conservation". So both the Enviros and the DFG were looking very closely at inshore fish counts.
Those 6000 fish a day counts may of gave the landings lots of short term business but they hurt the fishing community because now the enviros are calling for a closed season on bass during their spawn. Milton Love and the Santa Barbara crowd is already pushing for it. It's going to happen in the next two years, all because some landings wanted to increase their numbers of customers on their boats, and posted a bunch of dead bass in their counts.
There is no commercial fishery for those fish, only recs fish for those bass, and most Rec anglers like Kayakers don't take many but the sportboats do it because it's part of their business model and now because of their actions it's very likely that we will all loose our right to fish them during the spawning months, within a year or two.
What I'm saying here is that I hear you on that score. The keep everything you legally can mentality definitely hurts fisherman, if for no other reason then it gives us a bad rep, but what are you going to do?
There will always be sportboats, and it's always going to be in their best interest to keep as many fish as they can, because big counts are good for business, and more fish cleaning means more cash at the end of the day.
So as long as it's good for their bottom line they will take all they can, and that influences the fishing community as a whole.
Kinda like I said above posting big counts of fish like bass definitely encourages others to take more of them as well because it makes it seem more commonplace or acceptable to take them, but it's not necessarily good for fishing.
Once again it's not about bragging but it's about cultivating a mentality.
People do what they think it's cool to do. Right now we have group of fisherman convinced that there is nothing wrong with keeping every fish they hook as long as it's not over their limit, and with boat limits they can still catch fish for others even when that limit is achieved.
Is that good for fishing.. not really. It's a sportboat mentality, not the kayaker mentality, but it still exists even if it's something that needs to be changed.
Jim