A bait thread gone wild is entertaining, but hardly instructive.

While egg cures probably don't do any juvenile salmonids any favors, I suspect that a well-designed study would reveal that the hooks (particularly barbed ones) those cured eggs are attached to cause a far higher mortality than does the sulfite-laden cure.

But in keeping with the "let's blame everyone but me" attitude, yeah, let's ban bait and restrict all the waters to fly fishing only, of course all flies must be tied with natural materials only, no synthetics, and all rods must be made of bamboo, no synthetic fiber rods, and only with reels made in England, lines made of silk, leaders made of gut, no nylon and especially no flourocarbon, and ah, what else? Oh, no boats powered by combustion motors and no breathable waders. Hey, this could lead to some serious fish conservation - NOT. But it would get a few of you louts off the water and leave me in relative peace if only I can find a silk line and gut leader . . .

t.i.c.

Sg

??

Merry Christmas to you too, more eggnog.

Keith are you still spraying your eggs with starting fluid? Just wondering

Nope, haven't done that in years... Not good for the environment, been manufacturing my own scents for quite some time now...

Keith

This thread is getting crazy, but I have a point to make. Most of you are assuming smolts are eating the eggs on your hooks. I would have to imagine that the majority of the eggs eaten are the ones you lose during casting or cracker off on failed hooksets. I will go through two skeins of eggs in a day easy when I am sidedrifting without hooking a single fish.

That's a very valuable point....

Keith

You mean, you do the same thing over and over, expecting a different result?

Another thing to think about is that steelhead and salmon are tertiary consumers so what ever you feed them when they are young will continue to build up throught the generations, meaning the adult fish you catch and eat have the potential of having elevated levels of sulphates, has anyone done a study to see how much sulphates we are injesting when eating salmon/steelhead?

Wow, thats creepy, or slimey.

You trying not to make sense or you on one of those Sunday night Binges?

Keith

I can verify that steelhead and salmon generations accumulate elevated levels of sulphates, sulphites, and many other substances.

I often fish a stream my great grandfather fished. He used to cure his eggs in some kind of sulpherate canabis sulphited cocaine borax mixture. I tried to get the recipe from him a few times, but he never really made sense. He blabbered something about curing eggs at the crossroads, under the new moon, with Robert Johnson playing in the background.

I'm pretty sure he was a tertiary, primary, secondary, and quarternary consumer. I know he caught one hell of a lot of fish.

To this day, if you consume a steelhead from that stream, you will miss the next three days of work but you sure as hell won't regret it.

thats funny

Keith, since you cant wait to step in make me the issue, I will explain it to you.


Fish eat bugs

Fish eat worms

The theory is, you become what they eat.

In your case, maybe its just a coincidence, fish dont get the joke either.

Article
http://www.nativefishsociety.org/newsletter/documents/Fall_2009_Strong_Runs_low_res.pdf