Catch & Release

Getting Started in Flyfishing Catch-and-Release Fishing: Introduction By GORP Expert Angler Mark D. Williams

Why practice catch-and-release fishing? A better question might be, why not?
Some look at catch-and-release fishing as a moral victory. They believe that eating the fish you catch is just plain wrong. I think that attitude is elitist, short-sighted, and a subject better left for the fishing forum.
Catch-and-release fishingis just good policy.
Catch-and-release fishing does several positive things other than make stuffed shirts happy. The practice leads to bigger fish. If you put a fish back instead of keeping it, it gets bigger. Bigger fish produce better progeny. And fish that survive in the wild produce fish that will have those same survival characteristics.
There's nothing wrong with keeping a fish or two for the frying pan, but if you keep too many—if too many people keep too many, and if too many people keep too many big ones—the quality of the fishery declines eventually. And with the world's fisheries getting more and more pressure from the growth of sport fishing, it makes sense for us to keep their future health in mind.
If you do practice catch and release, (chances are you'll have to at some point, since so many rivers and lakes now have regulations requiring it), you need to do it correctly because if you don't, it can harm the fish. Catching and handling fish can build up their lactic acid, increase their body's pH rise, and tire them out. Once you tire out a fish and release it improperly into the water, that fish can get caught in the current and get swept away. It also becomes more vulnerable to predators, and because of these and other factors, it might not survive after you went to all that trouble to release it.
Some anglers like to preserve their catch with a taxidermy mount for their living room wall. But I think the best-looking ones are those created from photographs of the fish, not the real deal—and that creature is still swimming the water for some other trophy hunter.
So practice catch-and-release fishing if you want to see healthy fisheries in the future, producing fertile, strong fish populations for generations of anglers to come.
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