When the Forrest Wood Cup competitors finish their weigh-ins, the fish they've taken from Lake Murray will be returned- hopefully, very little worse for wear.
Tournament anglers are concerned with catching fish and they employ what I'd call "a winch and bucket" technique once a fish is hooked. It is winched out of the water as quickly as possible, examined for size, and tossed into the livewell (bucket) where it's then hauled around for what may be hours. At that point, it's grabbed out of the dark water, tossed into a sack (albeit a high-tech one) and dunked in a series of aerated tanks, after which it (and up to four of its fellow travelers) is dumped into a weigh-in scale, then unceremoniously dumped back into a holding tank. It's role finished, it is then put in a big tank full of fish, and returned to the lake from which it was caught.
If that doesn't sound like Betty and Barney Frank's description of being kidnapped by a UFO, I don't know what does. Thankfully, fish lack the ability to sit around and describe their days to each other. For the so-called lucky tournament fish, it's then back to the daily grind of survival.
UFO-abduction analogy aside, it's really no small feat to keep fish alive and practice catch-and-release. Neither is it inexpensive. Both point to the conservation predisposition of fishing today. I've spoken with Ray Scott and many other early tournament anglers and heard them talk about the "lean times" when "batter and fry" was the logical outcome for fish after they were officially weighed. Neither economics nor technology lent itself to the highly-complicated and very costly process of returning fish to the wild.
So how well do we average (OK, I'm below-average at "catching" but about average at "fishing") anglers do at catch-and-release? Based on a piece written by Craig Springer of the US Fish and Wildlife Service in the latest edition of "Eddies" it seems that's a question that's very dependent on the type of hooks we use.
As Springer observes "hook-and-cook" has a one hundred percent mortality rate. But a USFWS Northeast Fishery Center study on striped bass seems to indicate that the traditional J-hook, compared with the newer circle hooks are pretty potent killers as well.
Striped bass were caught from the Hudson River by volunteer anglers using both traditional and circle hooks. The striped bass were tagged and held for five days in an underwater cage near shore.
In the end, sixteen percent of stripers taken with J-hooks died; only five percent caught on circle hooks. In simple mathematical terms, the J-hooks were more than three times as likely to kill.
To me, those mortality statistics look significant - and should be an endorsement for the use of high-tech hooks whenever you're not, well, fishing for food.
The results of the study have been published in the Journal of Fisheries Management and will likely serve as resource material when managing striped bass fisheries in the future.
Springer's note on the study is only one of the many good reads in the latest edition of "Eddies". You can read it online at: http://www.fws.gov/eddies/pdfs/EddiesSummer2008.pdf.
