Get Some...

The North Carolina Delayed Harvest season ends this Saturday. With "harvest" no longer being delayed, trout anglers are free to open up a can of niblets and jerk a limit of the tasty little creatures from our once pristine, yet heavily poached, waters.

Lest you fret, fisheries folk tell us that most of the pellet munchers stocked in waters that fall under these regulations would never be able to survive the heat of a Carolina summer. Thus catch and release becomes corn meal and hot grease and the circle of life continues. The good news is that next year North Carolina will have added additional streams to the program and the catch and keep on the first half of the first day will be limited to anglers age 16 and under.

Me? I'll be fine. I plan to focus on warm water close to home with the occasional foray to our area tail waters. I even have a trip planned to check out this Bristol Bay / Pebble Mine thing first hand during late August. Don't forget to support their charity auction. My goals for that trip include not being eaten by a grizzly and to catch something on a mouse fly.

New Texas Largemouth Bass Record

If only they had weighed it and not filleted it.....

Recently that's what happened to a largemouth bass from a private lake in Fannin County, which died despite the angler's efforts to keep it alive. The angler guesstimated the fish's weight at 21 pounds-which would have been a new state record-before filleting it.

The article in the Beaumont Enterprise also tells us about a unique Texas program:

Each year from Oct. 1 until April 30, TPWD accepts largemouth bass weighing 13 pounds or more into the ShareLunker program to be used in a selective breeding program aimed at producing bigger bass in Texas.

Think stud farm for largemouth bass. What a life for a lunker.

It's not for everyone

The Ledger's Harry Hurt went to fly fishing school and decided it just wasn't for him. He didn't like all the knots, didn't have much luck with the fish, and couldn't understand catch and release.

"Maybe I was mentally shell-shocked, but the thing that really bugged me (pun intended) was the fly fishing credo of catch-and-release. In the unlikely event that I hooked a fish, I wasn’t supposed to take it home and fry it up for dinner. Instead, I was expected to follow a prescribed procedure for removing the hook and “respirating” the fish before gently reintroducing it to the water. All that sounded environmentally correct, and I appreciate humanity’s Sisyphean existential plight as much as anybody. But I just didn’t see the point: if you can’t eat the fish, why bother to catch them at all?"

When the class was over he let his instructor know his future fishing plans:

By now we’d been out on the water nearly two hours, and it was time for Ed and me to turn in our borrowed gear. As we trekked back to the Orvis lodge, Ed said he planned to go fishing again that evening on his way home to western Pennsylvania. I said I was going to eat fish at my favorite sushi restaurant in Sag Harbor and wash them down with bottles of hot sake.

Following the Stocking Truck - Chinese Style

Most of us who grew up around stocked trout streams have been witness to the long line of cars following the trout stocking truck from fishing hole to hole. It seems this might not just be a phenomenon unique to the USA. Recently the Chinese government's attempts to restock a polluted river ran in to a bit of a problem.

"Shortly after the release was completed, more than 1,000 residents in Jilin swarmed to the riverbank with nets and other fishing equipment," Xinhua said.

Reminds me of opening day of hatchery support trout season around these parts.