Could you elaborate on why you did not take the fish home and eat it yourself, youknow the legal and moral course of action

Please seek help. Immediately.

Agreed

There was a guy selling cat pelts on the Trading Post last year, This has to be a runner up to him

If a fish is bleeding chances are it is going to die, now or later. So you have to mitigate the situation by leaving the hook in the gut, if you can't then ... oh well. It has been a long time since I gut hooked a bass, using live bait will increase your chances of gut hooking a fish. Funny story.

This poor guy is getting more grief than when I misspelled Lake Welsh.

Bass swallow hooks regularly, especially on weightless presentations. Don't stress over it. It is a fish and a small one at that. Too many folks think if you dig a hole and stock it with bait and bass in 20 years it will be full of giant bass. It doesn't work that way.

The bass proliferate to the point that if you don't remove the small ones every year you wind up with a lake full of stunted bass that may never exceed 2 pounds. I fished a beautiful private lake a couple weeks ago near Mineral Wells that had been electro-shocked the fall before. It was determined the lake was over populated with small bass. We were asked to kill every fish we caught 16" and down. We killed 78 bass out that day and threw them in a ditch for the buzzards.

Dunno if that makes you feel any better but it needs to be done every year.

Ill go first.

As a kayak fisherman ive got no livewell or large cooler. So I will place the bass or other fish on a Stringer and hang them over the side of the kayak. Sometimes I don't set out to keep fish but it occurs to me to do so. In such cases I'll rig up a makeshift stringer like MacGyver would have.

When the day is done I will throw the fish into my small ice chest and clean them when I get back home or back to Camp or what not. In this case a friend clean them for me. Hes much better at it than me. Thanks Tommar!

See example A. from Falcon back in January.



I am 100% behind releasing large fish. However I think when we started putting bass on a pedestal and acting as if they were untouchable we really did not help the sport and in a lot of ways we got away from why we, and our fathers and their fathers started fishing in the first place.

Prime example of why I�m hesitant to ever fish with a stranger from the TFF.

OH MY GOODNESS!

I forgot a vital detail in my story. This little lake (not telling where, I seem to have a lot of enemies on here lately) has signs all around it that say "Catch and release only" (not private but more pond than lake).

I wasn't keeping fish, and no one else was fishing the lake so no one to give it to anyway if it was legal to do so. I was bank fishing so no fancy schmancy live well. I didn't have a cooler with me, and it was a good 30-45 minute walk back to the truck so a dead fish might have turned bad by then? (How long will a un-iced dead fish last before it is not safe to eat it? It would have been about an hour until i got home if I'd left right away.)

If I could do it over:

-I would still be in the position of disposing of a dead fish I couldn't keep. I guess if I could do it differently I would just throw it back whole so I wouldn't look like a weirdo.

Even if it was legal to keep the fish:

-So given that I had no iced cooler to bring it home with, and assuming the fish would have been unsafe to eat by the time I got home, I'd still want to somehow put it back in the lake where it could be meal for other animals. However, I'd put it back whole, since I now know that fish can't feel pain (so it wouldn't have been "suffering" anyway even if it was alive) and it's illegal to cut up a game fish. As you all know, other animals would / will feed on a dead fish body, so in my mind anyway, that's not really a waste, especially since it was an accidental death in the first place. It seems like the least wasteful option given the situation would still be to put the body back in the water.

Ultimately

It sounds like my only good legal option really was to put the whole, un-mutilated body back in the water? I explained why I cut it up already, it made sense in my mind, quick death, making sure it was really dead (floating sideways so it probably was) not causing suffering ect.



On the rare occasion I did keep fish to eat (from a lake where it is legal to do so). I used to give them a good thump on the head and filet them right away and put them in a ice cold cooler. Or I would cut the heads off and put the bodies in the cooler. I found out this is illegal as well. I guess the Game Warden wants you to keep fish completely whole until you are done fishing for the day.

Honestly, I haven't kept fish since I learned that law. If I were to do so now, with what I've learned on here, I would put them quickly in a ice bath cooler, try to shock them quickly. But yeah if I had my druthers, I'd still process them into filets as soon I pulled them out of the water.

Lol

You guys are wrong. Funny though!

Do we have a �Weird Post� category? This one might be the winner.

I haven't read all the responses but when I have a fish that doesn't swim off I don't hack it up

Assuming its legal size I just toss it in the livewell and give it to someone at the marina or boat ramp. I have NEVER failed to find someone to take a dead fish off my hands even if its just one. Most lakes have a fishing pier or some sort of pay to fish barge. Just roll up to the dock and you will find someone who wants it.

All fish die, now or later, bleeding or not.

Been with a few gals that it was like being with a dead fish, but I did not hack them up. Couldn't get them to "swim" away either.