I was looking for a photo in my files the other day when I came across this one. A smile rolled across my face as I retraced the memories of that day, but it quickly disappeared when I recalled how the image caught me a little hell when we posted it on Facebook last winter.
“Did you have to keep ALL of them?” one person sniped. A few other snide comments followed, as like-minded posters did their best to soak me with guilt and paint me as a game hog while propping up themselves as pinnacles of conservation.
No surprise there.
Go to any online fishing forum and you’re sure to find those who are all too willing to share their holier-than-thou disgust whenever someone posts a photo that shows a bunch of fish awaiting the knife. Or worse, a fish that these preachy few deem (by some murky, subjective standard) too big to kill.
Drives me nuts.
Fish are a resource. And you use resources. Responsibly, yes, but you still put a knife through some of them—and maybe even lots of them (gasp) if the law and the fishery in question support such harvest.
In my case, the fish you see here are lake whitefish—80 of them to be exact (one is mostly out of frame, another is obscured by snow and there’s one little smelt). I caught my share of them late last January while fishing with seven friends on Wisconsin’s Little Sturgeon Bay, an inlet of Green Bay.
Eight guys, 80 fish.
I pursued a career as an outdoor writer in part because I couldn’t hack college math, but even I know that works out to a very reasonable 10 fish per guy. Would I have gotten the same flak had my friends and I posted photos of just our 10 fish versus all 80 lumped together?
I suspect not, but that’s beside the point.
Lake whitefish aren’t top-end predators like striped bass or muskies that live at low densities that can’t sustain much catch-and-keep. Nor are they slow-to-mature fish like sturgeon whose populations could take a huge long-term hit if a large proportion of their reproducing adults were suddenly filleted and bathed in boiling oil.
On the contrary, they’re an ultra-abundant, highly prolific species in Lake Michigan. And because of the fact they spend most of their lives in deep, open water, they’re only effectively targeted by recreational anglers when the ice is thick enough on the smaller bays and inlets to support foot and ATV traffic—and that doesn’t last long.
My 10 whitefish were a drop in the bucket. And they tasted like something Zeus would eat after I smoked them.
I plan to take home another 10 this winter, assuming my wife isn’t in labor at the time.
Can you blame me? — Ryan