Howdy Salmontackler,

I'm not picking a fight, just suggesting a method for solving your irritation. As a person who comes in contact with LOTS of saltwater fishermen, you then have a unique opportunity to impart some of your wisdom upon them.

My first trip to the peninsula took place about 12 years ago. I was fishing with a friend who had gotten me involved in catch & release flyfishing. He showed me that if you were in an area where you had the possibility of catching fish after fish all day long, it was wiser to release the majority of your catch so that your could fight more fish. At the end of that first day I had caught 13 September silvers at Sekiu. The smallest was about 12 pounds. We fished from sun-up until about 5pm that night. We got back to the campground and the two guys next to us asked what took us so long, afterall, we only caught 2 fish. These guys told us that they were done fishing by 7:30 am and were back on the beach by 8:00am. (These are probably the type of folks you were talikng about.) They showed us their fish, four fish in the 10 pound range. We showed them ours, the smallest was 17. Did we keep our liimits? Yes, but we let many of our fish go, and if we hadn't caught another fish after the first one we had kept, we would have still had a great trip.

These guys learned a little bit that day about selective fishing, as did I.

Teach people the better way. I know that a lot of folks now days have so little time for recreation, and that our society puts emphasis on achieving the goal, so that is probably what some of the shortsighted folks you run into regularly do, they concentrate on the short term goal, limits.

I choose to concentrate on catching fish, and if I boat 20 fish in an evening but we didn't get our limit, hey, we still caught 20 fish, which is more than most folks catch in a whole season. That is what I teach on my boat, maybe you could teach that in your store.

Hope you got some fish this weekend, I couldn't go. Andy