Personally I'm not against keeping fish at all. What I'm 100% against is
managing 99% of all our lakes for a meat fishery. Doing this sacrifices
the essence of the activity which is SPORT. It keeps everyone focused on
Killing 5 fish as a measure of success.
As a 99% management tool it is expensive to the max compared to managing
a Quality catch and release lake. Thus for our fishing money we get less and
less each year for more and more expense.
Additionally bait fishing seems to promote garbage littering and a Bubba
mindset I don't see in the crowd that fishes for sport alone. They RESPECT
the resource rather than viewing it as a place to get free meat and leave
their beer bottles.
We have had few additions to the quality lake program in Washington in
the last 10 years. In Canada you will see that 40-50% of all lakes have
restricted limits and/or single barbless hook regs. In California the legislature,
recognizing that the Fisheries Dept. pandered to the baitfishing crowd at the
expense of the sport, mandated by law that one lake per year be
converted to quality regs C&R fishing. They took the option to ignore the
sport fishermen away from their Fisheries Dept.
In Washington anyone who fishes the few quality lakes we have are
seeing the trend toware more and more fishermen preferring to catch
large trout for SPORT rather than dragging home (and often giving to neighbors)
a mess of muddy tasting trout. The quality lakes are getting loved to death to
degrading the experience for the sportsman.