As long as we keep fishing on immature fish we will significantly impeded recovery of big old fish. How do the get big? They are aggressive feeders. Makes them easier to catch.

Although it is trout, the experiance on the St Joe with Westslopes is useful. They put a 13" minimum size on the fish, selective gear so they would spawn once, and let 'er rip. Got really good recovery and creel checks showed the average size of harvested fish was something like 13.1". On Kelly Cr, with purely C&R, you got fish pushing 20".

We had these huge fish when the primary (close to only) fisheries were in the bays and rivers on adults.

Ideally, we should close down all kill fisheries on all juvenile fish. Once we see what happens and what the stock do we can ramp up harvest. I believe that as long as we tweak the current fisheries we just fiddle with the rate of extinction.