Radical Fishing

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George Merasty is not without empathy for the angler who wants to take home a real trophy. But, he reminds me, it's precisely Nueltin's prohibition against the harvest of all large fish year after year that enables this 1,200-square-mile lake on the border between Manitoba and the Northwest Territories to produce more trophy trout per angler per year dim any other lake in North America. He grins. If I truly regret having released my big trout, he says, then I can return in 20 years to this very same spot where-since lake trout often live 60 or 70 years-this very same fish, grown to world-record size, win undoubtedly be waiting for me.

For more than a century it has been the standard angling ethic in North America that while a fisherman may keep all or most of the big fish he catches, he is obliged to "throw back the little ones"—all fish below a certain minimum size. This ethic, stiff the basis for the vast majority of our sport-fishing laws, is founded partly on the seeming logic of enabling the little ones to someday replace their parents in both size and spawning capacity. And it is founded, as well, on traditional notions of sportsmanship and angler's honor: Small fish are "dumb," easy to catch and award no status to the fisherman; but big fish are "smart," worthy opponents, and so the angler is entitled to bring them home to show off to admirers.

But there is ample evidence that angling laws based on this simple minimum-size standard were never adequate for meeting the pressures of sportfishig. Beginning early in this century, minimum-size regulations led to the rapid-perhaps permanent—-depletion of large native fish in the more popular freshwater lakes and streams of the eastern U.S. In New York State, for example, the largest brook trout ever caught (eight pounds, eight ounces) was taken in 1908; the largest northern pike (46 pounds, two ounces), in 1940. Nothing even approaching the size of these impressive specimens has been taken in the last several decades.

Sportfishing pressure has increased enormously since midcentury. Not only has the number of anglers grown exponentially, but fishing has become an increasingly whitecollar sport. It's not at all unusual, today, for an angler to spend several thousand dollars for a week's fly-in trip to one of the continent's more remote lakes or rivers and another several thousand on sophisticated gear ranging from high-tech rods and reels to electronic "fish-finders." Small wonder, then, that freshwater fishermen from Florida to northern Canada are discovering that the trophy-sized fish commonly caught 30 or 20 or even 10 years ago can no longer be found. And in the most heavily fished bodies of North American water, where minimum-size laws have long been in effect, there are virtually no big fish at all-ordy "die little ones."

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