Fish Responsibly

So lucky to go fishing at dawn on a pristine beach this morning.  A calm sea and the water alive with what we West Aussies call Herring : a medium sized fighting fish.  Our mandated bag limit is 12 and I had mine within 70 minutes.  It was a fish almost every cast. I thanked the Great Life Force for allowing me this day to have some of the fruits of the sea. A yummy dinner tonight of fresh crumbed fish fillets. By the way I don't toss live fish into a bucket of seawater and let them suffocate.  I take them off the hook and immediately dispatch them.  Trying to be humane in the context of the reality of catching fish.  As readers would know I don't believe in caching fish for sport and release.  That is downright cruel. May the Force be with us! GD

Can't support the practice of catch and release.  Of course I want the agonised fish to be released, but I don't want to it put through the agony in the first place.  I just can't put any sort of fish through this process just to satisfy my primeval urge to hunt. All those fishing TV programs drive me up the wall as grown men scream their delight as they sink the hook and fight the fish to the boat or the shore. How childish and inhumane is that! The fruits of the sea belong to the great life Force and are there for us to catch to eat, that is to satisfy one of the primary needs of we humans. Each time I leave the beach after catching my bag limit I pause to thank the great life Force for providing me with the experience of a pristine ocean beach and for the fruits of the sea on that day. May the Force be with you! GD

Local beach fishers in southern Western Australia are still banned from catching the Southern Gharfish (SG).  I support bans when needed and this one is needed, but continue to reiterate that the SG is difficult to release when caught as a by catch to our usual Herring fishing forays. I was told by a Fisheries Dept person that if I caught an SG and had to kill it to get the deeply embedded hook out that I should have just cut the line as close to the hook as possible and released the fish back into the water.  In my view the fish would soon have died with the hook in its throat, apart from the fact that in handling the SG it releases all its scales. On this occasion I did not put the dead fish into the water as people sometimes swim in that section of the beach and I am not in the business of encouraging dangerous predators to come into swimming areas for dead whole fish.  I placed the dead SG deep into the sandhill vegetation which is far from the waterline. I would no...