Quote:
Originally Posted by Eskimo
Agreed! A five bass limit with a 12" minimum is absurd. That's the same as catfish! The difference is Fish & Wildlife stocks hundreds of thousand of catfish and few bass.
Not that it matters because the fine for poaching bass is only $40 - so it's all a moot point anyway. 
If Largemouth Bass and Smallmouth Bass are vital to New Jersey's recreational sport fishery as Fish & Wildlife says they are - then they need to start acting like it.
As for the number of people taking home the bass...it used to be true that few bass were harvested. When I was younger, catch & release was gospel. The only people who killed bass were old guys who never got the message about catch & release and wide-eyed kids so enthralled with their trophy bass they couldn't bear to release it.
But things are different in New Jersey now. We are being crushed under a relentless tsunami of immigration. These new anglers have no tradition of sport-fishing and the concept of releasing a perfectly edible bass to conserve the American fishery for people they don't even know and children who haven't even been born yet is completely illogical and doesn't benefit them at all.
. |
Yeah, I'm hearing a lot about immigrants & suspect such may have been the fate of Burnham Park. Possibly those ponds have returned to us since & I hope no one reads this who wants to go slaughter the fish. I haven't seen any immigrants fishing yet, besides the people who speak Polish on Lake Hopatcong. I have heard of problems with crappies and the like there, people taking bucketloads, heeding regulations not at all, but the foreigners I've met and spoken to, capable of broken English, like to take walleye and hybrids, but within the limits of the law.
A $40.00 fine is too low. There should be a range of possible fine, up to the discretion of the officer, given the actual situation, and fines should be enforced. And who wants to take regular limits of bass home? This hasn't happened since, like, the 1950's, so why is it legal to take five over 12 inches home? Fish & Wildlife seems out of touch with the scene. I like the trophy bass lake laws, about as should be everywhere, legal to take home one, say, and most of us won't anyhow. There should be allowance for the wide-eyed, but five bass? And if whoever wants to eat fish, well, carp are quite edible.
Not so many wide-eyed kids on the water these days, but always great when that happens. I was one of them, but got the idea to let them go, quick.
