How Often Do You Keep Trout?

[reset]

Never! Dont care for the taste of any creature that comes from water, sea included. Good old Alta beef for me.

[BowLurker]

BowLurker, I am sorry if you felt I was attacking you. My comment was just an observation that a good number of folks from BC like to bonk fish. It seems to be a much more common practice than here in Alberta.

I put the odd one in a sack when fish a certain scud filled lake.

Sorry if I ruffled your feathers

 

Not at all monger, not at all. I understand the attitudes of some BC folks are different when it comes to their fishing (bonking) but have never experienced it myself. I take pride in proper angling, and I keep maybe one or two fish a year. My bad if I sounded grumpy, it wasn't my intention.

 

 

-M.

[professori]

If Alberta had salmon, I suspect the kill rate would be just as high as it is in BC. If I have the opportunity to harvest a coho or spring from fresh water, not only will I do so, but I feel an obligation to do so. Quickly dispatching and carefully cleaning one's catch and then enjoying the meal it provides, makes an angler more mindful in how he views all his/her meals and the ethics involved in how they are brought to the table. I will often eat trout I catch from lakes and streams where it is legal. I love fish and the trout I keep and dispatch have a much better life (up to that point) than the fresh or frozen tank and net raised "rainbow trout" one can purchase in Safeway, and they taste so much better. All that said, I release hundreds of fish yearly as I only keep what my family will eat. To hell with neighbours who want me to kill one for them!

[muha]

Stocked lakes(chain lakes) i fish for meat, stream and river fish are always released.

[McLeod]

Some mountain Lakers this year were very tasty.

[Flyfisher]

Considering that I engage in a blood sport (fly fishing is a blood sport) it wouldn't feel right if I never kept fish for the table. I enjoy eating fish. I give the odd fish to my neighbors and they greatly appreciate it. There are hundreds of stocked lakes in BC and I see no reason to not retain some fish for table fare. I'm very particular about the fish I keep, they are almost exclusively rainbow trout that come from stocked lakes, lakes that grow tasty, orange/red, firm, fatty fleshed fish, and are tasty all season long. They invariably come from gin clear marl lakes that never winter kill. Scuds compromise much of there diets.Thus they have no hint of that mud taste that lake rainbow often have. I do not keep (for conservation reasons) stream westslope cutthroat trout even where permitted though good cutthroat streams that grow sizeable fish that allow for retention are few and far between in BC. It would strike me as somewhat perverse after catching hundreds of fish in a season to never keep any for table fare. What better food is there? The vast majority of fish I catch are released.

[halcyonsancta]

Grew up fishing on the coast - folks "taught" me... Geez, we had a freezer full of salmon (Spring and Coho). I was just little but I sensed there was something out of balance. My folks shared lots: the foster home at the Reserve got lots, it all got eaten, but when I got old enough and needed a Tidal Waters license and began to read the regs... well, that was it.

My folks were quite competitive in their sport fishing. One family friend began to see what was happening and he sold his fishing equipment and started scuba diving. He's pretty famous for his contribution to the Vancouver Public Aquarium. A writer and conservationist he became. Most of the small photos you see of various species in the aquatium displays (they're called "interpretive slides") were taken by this Gentleman. Anyway, I got the message when he quit sport-fishing. I stopped mooching and trolling and became a fly fisherman on my own. I began to follow the conservationist path. Read a good book entitled British Columbia Game Fish, edited by Peter Broomhall and Jack Grundle. That helped nail down the conservationist ethic for me.

Taught my daughter to fish - she follows the code. Bait fishing one day, she deep hooked a stocked Rainbow... fortunately, since it died, a nearby Osprey took it right off Grotto Mtn Pond about 40 feet from us.

Haven't harvested a fish in North America for 35 years. The only ones I keep I "catch" when my wife throws them in to the basket at Costco!