trickies schooling on Britomart make mocker of bag limits

[revs57]

Well said Foxy

[Angla]

Nearly 41,000 members and over 1,100 that have read your post.

There are most certainly alot on here that have an opinion and have kept quiet as enough has been said already. The whole thing is just going downhill now so I would also say a little quiet on this is now worthy.

I was convincing a friend to throw back some monster Jennie Muddies yesterday, close to 20 cm, and he now knows the regs on Muddies and how to tell the difference between Females and Males. He did get to keep 3 good size models and I convinced him to be happy with a great first effort.

Chris

[Lizard Man]

Size and bag limits:-

or

• must not possess a live coral reef fin fish unless the person or fisher intends to immediately return the fish to the sea or to dsiplay the fish in an aquarium.

So I guess this rules out keeping a fish(coral reef fin fish) alive in a live-well for possible "upgrading".

[oldboot]

This allong with fin clipping are areas of the regulations that need to be addressed.
It needs to be argued that the ability to keep fish alive and well is a better option and more in the interests of the environment that being required to kill every fish kept aboard.

There cold be some obtuse arguments as to what immediate is ( best of luck).

Of perhpas we should have aquariums aboard our boats and we could exhibit some fish. ....... and study its behaviour....... till we find a bigger one .

This like many other parts of the fisheries regulations is a case of throwing out the baby with the bath water.

cheers

[wags on the water]

We ended up with 13, so went thru the esky and chucked out the three smallest ones (the bag limit is 5 each, and there were two of us).


Dave.

In my opinion this is very wrong. No more...it's the law...

Yeh, sure Marty,

Are you telling me that if you had your bag limit of just legal snapper on board, then caught a 30 pounder, you would throw it back? Crap!!

Dave.

Whether it's snapper or any other species, if you have your bag limit the rest goes back. That's fishin'.
I had an awesome session on mackeral off the sunny coast some time ago, where inside the hour I had my bag limit of spotties (5 @ 95 - 100cms) and 1 schoolie. I proceded to fish for schoolies and ended up throwing 28 spotties back @ well over 120cms. It never once entered my mind to 'upgrade' as you put it. It was a huge adrenalin rush at catching and releasing these monsters. At least I knew they would be there for next time.

My 2cents,

Wags

[wags on the water]

So now that it was, in fact, a legal catch, had you caught 19 and through back 3, would you still believe you act within the law??

[Cheech]

I remember one trip I had that was going very nicely. We were about to hit our bag limit (10 between 2 of us), so when we reached 9 keepers, we started releasing, so that we had room left for that one big fish. We did end up getting the big one, but could also have gone home with 9. Point is, there are other ways to be able to upgrade which does not involve throwing away legal length fish.

[levinge]

I suppose what it really comes down to is "catch what you are going to eat, don't catch just to get to the bag limit".

If everyone is aiming constantly to fill their bag limit, then we are in pretty poor shape if we think we can continue the sustainability of fishing stocks off our coast.