Very unfair rule

[Icedaddy22]

Agreed Oats. I think we need more restrictive harvest on most fisheries. I think that having a regulation for bass instead of 15" or longer, it should be 2 bass, 12" or under. For the walleyes, I'm not sure how minimum length limits would be better than allowing anglers to keep an even smaller amount of small fish, such as 3 walleyes, 16" or under. I think the more you encourage the release of the big ones, the more big fish will be in the gene pool and thus the population will become larger and healthier. Fishing to me is more about catching than keeping as well. I agree with selective harvest rather than throwing fish in the cooler. Makes me so damn mad when I see someone keep big old trout or walleye, cats and pike for that matter too. Big fish don't taste very good anyway because they get softer and fatty. The smaller ones are firmer, leaner, and cook up a lot better. There are some fisheries though where MORE fish need to be harvested as well though. I know of a lot of places, such as Vega Reservoir Rainbows, and Gunnison River Browns, where the harvest should be increased. Should be 8 trout on Vega for a few years to thin out the little ones. For the Gunnison, should be 8 browns, only one of which can be greater than 15" for a few years. The browns are overpopulated here, though wading through the 12 - 20" ones will get you into big browns up to 15 pounds still. Too many browns is also one reason the greatest rainbow fishery I have seen besides maybe the Glenwood section of the Colorado is having difficulty coming back, though I am catching a few more rainbows this year than last. Those rainbows used to average 18 - 30" and 10 - 15 pounders were almost a guarantee if you hit the river in the canyon by floating. Heck, when we fished in a party of three this year, we still caught about a dozen bows in the 6 - 10 pound range on spinners, and a decent amount of smaller 2 - 4 pounders too. I caught 230 trout on my three day trip in the Gorge this year, and only 19 were rainbows. A couple were small bows, the rest were all three pounds or better. Not that I have anything against brownies, I love them. But there are too many brownies in the gorge, and that is hindering the rainbows that were hammered by WD from coming back. I cannot imagine what it was like 20 years ago. Would I have been catching a 100 bows from 3 - 15 pounds per trip? Probably so. If only. I want to see this fishery come back. What an amazingly beautiful river and gorgeous wild fish.

Tyler
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