Bass. Vs walleye tournaments

[Jefferson]

 So driving around and seeing on every street corner and church sign "Walleye Friday fish fry"  and guessing that most anglers keep their limit to take home to eat  do walleye fisherman/tournament anglers face the same pressure about harming the population of walleye as bass fishermen do with bass?

[djkimmel]

Walleye tournaments don't have the same bias against them that bass tournaments do. Walleye have a harder time surviving the ride in the livewell than bass do especially according to new research on water temperature changes - they're affected more by temperature differences.

Walleye tournaments do generally try to release their fish alive but maybe because most anglers do not release their walleye people are used to the idea that all walleye anglers keep their walleye. Still, you'd think because bass anglers try hard to release their bass alive we would be thought better of than we are but there's another one of those paradoxes of humanity for you.

Bass in general see a 60-93% voluntary keeper live release rate in Michigan. I would not consider bass a 'harvest' fish and I give a good deal of credit to our great bass fishing to this voluntary catch and release ethic.

I definitely consider walleye a harvest fish since few people practice catch and release for 'tasty' walleye. Every year anglers do their best to catch and keep as many walleye as possible requiring in some instances that walleye are stocked, paid for by lots of bass anglers too buying fishing licenses, to maintain fishing populations large enough to try to keep walleye anglers happy.

You would think, considering that bass tournament anglers MADE catch-and-release what it is today that we would be well thought of and popular but that is not how it has worked out. I blame a number of things for that and mostly they are negative and unacceptable to me because they smack of blaming the victim for ill treatment. It has been 'okay' to not like bass tournament anglers in Michigan and I'm trying to change that because bias and prejudice are always wrong. We don't deserve much of what is targeted against us.

Some people will say we do because of things like high speed, power-loading and supposed mistreatment of other anglers by bass 'tournament' anglers but again much of it smacks of rationalizing acceptance of prejudice and bias by pretending we are all the same, and equally to blame for the actions of a few outliers - they exist in every population of types of people and they are no more prevalent in bass tournament anglers than any other group of people.

Most bass tournament anglers are good, every day decent people who just like fishing, and their one real difference is that some of the time they prefer to fish in a group instead of alone.

[djkimmel]

I will say that walleye tournament anglers felt some pressure in the old days when they did not release their catches or have much of a survival rate, but like bass tournament anglers they have improved their equipment and ability to keep fish alive and release them in better shape. They also, like us, try to donate the few that don't survive, to people in need.

If you take a number of anglers and monitor all the fish they catch a certain number may well die later out of the total caught even if they are not tournament anglers. Fishing does cause some mortality but fishermen also pay for the management of the resource and, considering how good our fisheries are in general, the fish come out ahead in the long run being fished by the user pays system.

The fisheries that are suffering around Michigan generally are not suffering due to fishing pressure but due to other pressures such as the loss of alewive affecting the salmon in Lake Huron, or the change in forage for Saginaw Bay walleye causing the walleye to eat most of the perch.

[DeanV]

I would expect differences in how they are viewed since walleye are managed as a fish to be caught and kept in many areas. 

Once a fish is viewed as a sport fish instead of a one caught primarily for food, people tend to be more concerned about protecting native fish (preferred over stocked strains, for example).  Look at the MI Musky program as well as an example of moving forward and stocking native strains now instead of non-native strains of muskies when possible.  Currently, the DNR is working on stocking more Great Lakes Strain.  Trout angles favoring wild fish vs stocked is another similar dynamic, IMHO.

I do not think anglers view catch and release species as a commodity but rather as a valuable resource to be preserved as much as reasonably possible while still allowing for sport fishing.

I do wonder though, as Doug Stange often wrote about, once the harvest connection is removed from angling, are we going to see a rise in anti-angling sentiment since the non-angling public may be more likely to view catch and release fishing as cruel.  Non-anglers, while choossing not to fish, are more likely to be able to relate and be fine with people fishing for food.

I do not think most bass anglers are very anti-tournament though.  I supposed that if someone has headed out for a day of fishing to find a tournament going on at the lake would probably be disappointed with the experience if it results in the lake feeling crowded or exceptionally busy.

I have only been bothered a few times on a lake fishing.  Once, when I was a kid, I was stopped by skiers asking me to get off the lake cause my 12' 5 HP boat was making waves and they were skiing the slalom course in the middle of the lake (I was going around them to stay out of their way and head to the larger part of the lake).  The other time was when someone throated to shoot us because we were fishing near their dock.  It was on a small lake and they even had metal stakes hidden under the water near their dock to scrape the bottom of canoes as they went by.

There is a lot of information our there on tournaments, mortality rates,bass behavior, ecology, etc.  I think as long as the general fishing public believes that tournament anglers are showing proper concern for those issues, tournaments will be supported.  If the general population feels the tournament anglers are ignoring warning signs of problems, then support will drop for tournaments.