Thread: Has the thought occured to you?

if your worried about numbers throw back any females, dinks, slabs, or hawgs. and to yall blaming the fwc, i have an idea if you know law breakers report them period. specks like the earth will take care of themselves. be responsible for yourself and stop looking for someone else to take care of the problems.

if he can ask for fishing liscense,boat registration, check the boat for safety equipment than he sure has the time to open mine or your cooler or whatever and take a peek at our fish instead of just asking how many you caught without even checking.
The someone I look to, to take care of the problem, is the guy with the badge,who took the job and gets paid to do it, but ....some of them dont.

In over 20 years on Toho,Hatch and Kissimmee I have been stopped many times and never had them take the energy and look at my fish to see if I was telling them the truth or not.
Its time some of them start doing their job right, especially if they expect the public to co-operate and turn "poachers" in.
In my boat I have a counter (thumb clicker type) that I keep track of the fish on,along with one of those "golden" rulers

Originally Posted by Hotpepper

Fished Kissimmee in January and caught a lot of fish and several big crappie, 11inches or bigger.

Not picking on you Pepper, but this just shows you what some folks consider big, others do not. Don and I are lucky and get to fish almost every week. But we cull at 12 inches. An 11 inch fish is a throw-back. And we never keep a 50 fish limit (between the two of us) anyway because we would have crappie fillets up to our ears after a while.

An yes, we measure EVERY ONE that is even close. Last week we tossed a couple of 11 7/8" fish, a bunch of 11 inchers, and scores of smaller ones. We caught 82 fish that day. Did not keep a single one.

We are not fisheries experts. I imagine some university studies have been done on sustainable crappie populations in Florida, but I have never seen anything published. It would be interesting to talk to an expert on this subject. All us ignorant fishermen can do is "speculate" (pun intended ).

Tom

11-14 inches is my personal slot...got a darn freezer full of them jokers too... although the big 14 inch females produce alot of minners in the spring they are 4 year old fish and usually kick the bucket shortly after.. i sure aint gonna let a beauty like that go back to die a few months later... just my opinion of course