John Salamone Allow me to address a few things here.
First of all, the loss of fish in any volume is unfortunate. We take this very seriously and do everything within our power to maintain the health of this resource.
It was stated in another thread that people were waiting for hours in line with their fish, and that is absolutely false.
We limit the number of bags for this purpose. In this event the anglers were allowed to fish until 2 and had to be in line by 3 to weigh in. A
side from our top ten from day one, which we build up and make a big presentation and have them come up to music and the like, we had every team weighed in by about 4.
We invested very heavily in a live release trailer last year and have been told by experts that it is a state of the art piece of equipment.
Our tanks in the weigh in line are oxygenated and we control the water temp (as much as possible) and have been told by Texas Parks and Wildlife personnel that it is the best system they have seen.
I�ve stated multiple times that if a fish reaches our system alive, it comes out of the system alive.
Reducing the number of teams would not have affected the percentage of dead fish.
There exists no better system than what we use to insure survival of the fish.
I think we need to address the education of the anglers and more importantly the boat captains to make sure they are prepared for this problem.
We have all been there and have had issues keeping fish alive at one time or another but over the years we all have learned many of the tricks of the trade to decrease the morbidity rate.
I will address this with our team further but rest assured that this is being discussed at this very moment within our group.
I appreciate the constructive criticism but the folks doing the rock throwing or the attempts to stir the pot speaks volumes about the character of the person.
Intelligent people can disagree but the bashing or attempts to bash is simply childish and unfruitful.