Catch and release or keep

0:00This is Daniel Galhardo and you're listening to the Tenkara Cast, a podcast about the simple Japanese method of fly-fishing, Tenkara. In the Tenkara Cast, we'll be sharing information on techniques, history, philosophy, and Tenkara stories from anglers all over the world. This podcast is brought to you by Tenkara USA, introducing Tenkara outside of Japan since 2009. It's only possible we create content such as this podcast and videos because of your support. So we thank you so very much for purchasing Tenkara USA rods, lines, and flies. I hope you enjoy learning more about the simple method of fly fishing. Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the Tenkara Cast. Right now it's October 24th, I'm here in the studio recording this. And today's topic, I'm going to be talking about catching and releasing fish, but also catching and keeping fish. So a little bit of the controversial kind of, you know, somewhat taboo conversation that we have in fly fishing sometimes, but I do think it's an important topic. But before I get into today's conversation, I'm going to talk just a little bit about the last week. There's been, it was a busy week. I started off by heading out east to visit the to participate in the Tenkara Jam an event put out by Jason Sparks this is the third annual Tenkara Jam that he put together this time it was in Cherokee North Carolina really fun and got to participate for a day went there to do a presentation got to meet a lot of you actually several of you have came up to me and said that you listen to my podcast so I appreciate that I I always like learning about that in person, knowing that you're listening to this podcast.

1:56There was about 100 people or so. A variety of different presentations were done by different members of the community. Pretty fun. It was just a really cool day, a good area to do the event. After the Tenkara Jam was done at around 3-ish in the afternoon, I went out and fished a little bit in the creek. and that was pretty fun as well just always nice to fish in a new area the next day I had to go out to West Virginia to do some training with one of the shops that we work with Waterstone they're actually a climbing shop primarily but they do carry a product and several of the staff in the store were interested in learning more about Tenkara so I went up there and did that and then A little bit of climbing, of course. Just a little break because the three days after that, I had a pre-packed schedule where I went to Arkansas out of all places to work with a company that we work with out there for some filming.

3:00Spent three days filming videos for a how-to series on Tenkara. So that's going to be integrated into the book as a final project, but it's also going to go on the web whenever it's all said and done. So that was very productive, caught quite a few fish. I think I got everything that I wanted to say in there, and I'm really excited about this series. I'll let you know a little bit more when it's getting closer to completion. Came back Friday night, and then the next day had an event here in town selling some tenkara rons. We saw quite a few actually to people that several people who never fly fish before. And then the day after on Sunday, that was yesterday, went out and did an afternoon of stream cleaning up Boulder Creek. And then a little bit of fishing with people that joined us. So real busy week, but very fruitful and a lot of fun actually. So I really enjoyed it. Now I'm here back in the office.

4:02I'm trying to be devoted and not step out. tell you the weather is beautiful right now in the fall but we do have some kind of warm weather front coming staying here and I'm dying to go out fishing a little bit more I'm dying to go climbing but I am really resisting the urge right now I really kind of have to get this book done I feel like I'm starting to fall a little bit behind so I'm gonna stay here but I thought I'd do a little podcast episode to kind of get the the juices flowing before I start working on the book again. In any case, I'm probably not going to talk for a super long time, so I will name this a short cast. I'll try to keep it to about 10 minutes because it's a topic that I'll share some philosophies that I personally have, and I'll discuss a little bit more about it. But today I'm going to be talking about catching release and catching keep. Controversial taboo topic so in fly fishing we nowadays of course fishing is a sport first and foremost we for the most part we really don't depend on catching fish to survive to eat um i'd say actually we just don't need that there might be a few a few people around the world that do some tribes perhaps that really really rely on catching fish for uh for a living we don't really have to do that we We have supermarkets to go buy food and then we can keep the fish in the water for sport.

5:35And I do see that point of view of using fish and the fish is a resource for sporting, if you will, even though I really don't like using the word sport for angling. I just don't feel like it's really a sport. Or if it is, and this is a topic that I actually want to discuss in a podcast at one point, uh there was a comedian i believe it was brian reagan who talked about if fishing is a sport it is the only sport where the participants or no how does he say sorry if fishing is a sport it is the only sport where the opponent doesn't know he's playing so uh that's kind of like my little take on sport angling but it is a sport uh you know or for lack of a better word it is a sport nowadays however fishing of course started as a means to catch protein to catch some sustenance people would go fishing in order to secure food and to a large extent a lot of people still do go fishing to get to to keep food but in fly fishing the ethos you know since the probably mid-70s has been to to catch and release um there's a there's the saying um lee wolf used to you know used to say that a fish is too precious to catch only once or something along those lines i'm not quoting him exactly i'm paraphrasing here i believe but a fish it is is generally too precious to catch only once the idea is that you put it back in the water let somebody else catch it later on but there's of course two sides to the story here you know we're using a fish you know a living being to enjoy an activity and we catch him and some may argue hurt him and bring him to hand and enjoy that aspect of seeing what is below the water you know enjoy that trying to entice a fish with an artificial lure and bring him to hand there's a lot of things to be said about the joy of fishing as a sport period but on the other hand you know what is the real purpose of catching fish if we're not gonna eat them and of course I go back and forth a lot I keep fish I would say once or twice a year pretty rare that I do keep fish and I'll share a little bit my my rule of thumbs to catching and keeping but it is something that is really common like I talked to a lot of people who are new to fly fishing who are interested in taking up fly fishing and I would say close to half of the people who are new to fly fishing they are they always ask me like you know about keeping fish because they're interested I mean fishing in the minds of the largest the large amount of the population fishing equals keeping fish you know you're doing it for a purpose and a purpose for for the most part that people understand and it is a clear easy uh purpose to understand is to catch fish to keep it and to eat it uh it takes a little while for folks to realize that uh you know many of us do fly fishing as a sport recreationally where we release most of the fish and of course in most parts of the world the idea of catching a fish and then releasing it it's going to be absolutely laughable i mean if you watch the shows like river monsters for example and you know with where jeremy wade is going to different countries you know very remote villages and he'll catch large fish and then you know before you know the the people around him can say anything he releases the fish and everybody looks at him completely puzzled like why did you go through all the trouble of catching a fish if you're going to release it but he's doing it for a sport of course and so the natural thing really is to catch and keep you know that's kind of what's been around for a long time um it's instinctual You know, most people, they just kind of want to catch fish and keep it for eating.

9:55And I'm not a hypocrite. You know, I do eat meat. I'm not a vegetarian, even though I do believe or I do wish that we as a human society had been trained to be better vegetarians because I think, you know, you can definitely eat vegetarian meals and get sustenance. But in any case, I don't. I do eat meat and sometimes I will catch trout. And what it does is, the interesting thing about catching and keeping trout once in a while is that it makes me think of food in a completely different way. It's never pleasant to take the life of a fish. I have never taken any joy in doing that, especially because I do have this connection with fish that goes beyond sustenance. I mean, in a certain way, I make a living out of asking people to catch and release fish. But when you do decide that you want to keep a fish, there's this kind of ritual that takes place where you're taking a life and then you're going to eat it.

11:02And I think a lot of people might not think so much about it. I know a lot of people that do when they do keep fish that it's something that they don't take very lightly and I don't. um I might be a little bit more touchy about that um but two or three times a year I'll keep fish and you know I purposefully I know I'm gonna keep fish and you know and I usually take um big responsibility and just a lot of uh honor in kind of doing that and eating a meal that I caught but let me talk a little bit before you know I'm just kind of waxing poetic here going pretty soft and tender on the topic. But before I go any further, let me talk a little bit about the rule of thumbs that I have to when I catch and keep fish. And I'll talk about catching and releasing as well, which is what I do 99% of the time. So the way that I approach catching and keeping fish um i have a few rule of thumbs first and foremost um places that have a very large population of fish a thriving population of fish um especially in the smaller sizes like the eight to eight to ten eight to twelve inch fish uh places that you just see like a ton of them in any particular pool and just and oftentimes those are going to be places that have just about no pressure so one of the little rule of thumbs that I have for places that I allow myself to catch and keep fish are places that I'm absolutely certain see less than an angler a week so oftentimes it's for me here in the front range in Colorado you know I drive into the wilderness areas nearby and if I have to hike a certain amount and I've been there a couple of times perhaps I know those places don't see many anglers at all and I have a hard time believing that the stretches of some of the streams that I fish see more than one angler a week and you know the rationale is that you know a stream a healthy stream with a lot of fish can probably sustain two or three fish being taking per week, you know, in a given year, you know, and I'm talking about just the fishing season, really. Most of those places you want to fish in the winter anyways. So that's my rule of thumb number one, my two rule of thumbs, thriving populations less than an angler a week.

13:41And lastly, which kind of allows me to, or helps me in the decision as well, the other two points first you know is the place stocked if it's not stocked i mean i just want to make sure it's a thriving population of fish but there are some places that i would allow myself i really don't very often to keep fish if i know there's a healthy robust stocking program that keeps putting fish in there i'm not crazy about the the whole stocking thing but i do believe they're stocking fish for a reason. And that's usually to allow a certain number of fish to be taken in a day. And lastly as well, places that have a thriving population of fish that are not native to the area, but are also prolific. So pretty much that rule applies primarily to the western part of the United States, where there's some streams that have brook trout, which are very prolific breeders. They thrive in waters that might not be quite as fast moving perhaps, you know, so they can kind of find all these like calm pools to hang out. So that kind of usually means I, for the most part, if I am keeping fish, I'm going to keep brook trout because what I experienced with brook trout streams, there's a couple of things that I've experienced. First, you find a calm pool of water where, you know, you might expect to catch a fish, but all of a sudden you catch 10 brook trout and they're all kind of like small size. So I kind of figured like keeping a couple, you know, and letting the other fish thrive based on the food resources that they have is not a bad thing. Just kind of keeping their numbers in check a little bit. But the other thing that I've experienced with brook trout in particular, there's a stream actually that I fished a few times close to home that have a thriving population of brook trout.

15:40And a couple of years ago, I noticed that I was actually starting to catch a couple of the cutthroat that we have in the area. And I believe they were probably planted because I hadn't caught any of those earlier. But in that area, so I was catching brook trout for a while. All of a sudden, I started catching cutthroat. And it was great. It was like a really nice mix of cutthroat and brook trout. And a few months go by, and all of a sudden, I start fishing there again. and all I'm catching is brook trout and I'm not catching a single cutthroat and I fish there another time you know and only cut only brook trout no cutthroat so in a certain way I got this really strong impression that the brook trout in that stream were completely displacing what is the native fish in the area so that was kind of like the last time that I caught fish and I'll share that in a minute here you know the experience of doing that but that just kind of gave me a little validation that in some places where you have very prolific breeders that might be displacing the native trout it's really actually probably a good thing to catch and keep some fish the other thing too to keep in mind in terms of catching and keeping fish pretty much all waters have in the united states have a limit on the numbers of fish and usually the size of fish that you're allowed to keep. So you look at a fly fishing regulation book, and it'll tell you how many fish of particular sizes and species you can keep out of a particular watershed or stream or river. And those numbers, you know, I usually kind of look at them and it's like, well, those numbers have been created for a reason. And I'm assuming that they're doing some research based on how many anglers are fishing in a certain area what is the fish stock you know what is the fish population like in the area can so many anglers catch and keep so many fish and they kind of make a decision based on how many fish people can keep so you know besides the ethics of it and the morals and you know the moral dilemmas that we might face in terms of deciding when to catch and keep fish, I think a very important thing, and you have to do this regardless, is look at the regulations. Is it legal to catch fish and how many and so forth?

18:14I've got no problem with it if it's legal based on those numbers. Although I do highly, highly encourage all of our listeners and I highly encourage everybody that I teach to catch and release fish even if the rules allowed for for a few fish to to be kept and usually i teach them the rules that i just shared you know like is it a place to see almost no anglers uh does it have a very strong thriving population of fish where in every pool you're going to see a bunch of fish and about you know the eight to ten inches and so forth so you have the legal parts of it and then some decision making that you have to make based on your own values and that kind of thing um in terms of fish size you know of course uh you know the regulations um uh definitely are the uh the most important criteria um but if places uh require large fish to be kept like if uh there's i know at least one river if you want to keep fish they have to be above I think either 14 or 15 inches. I actually honestly just don't keep any of those fish and I wouldn't anyways because they they have pressure but the fish size that I always keep are between about 8 and 10 inches in size. Most of them are I'm going to try to keep it between 9 and 11 or so actually and that's just a really good size to eat. It's usually a size that when you find pools you find a lot of fish of that size so i'm kind of seeing it as allowing a few a few fish to get bigger and taking a few to reduce the stock a little bit so those are just a few that kind of a little bit of the rationale that i go through when i want to catch and keep fish as i said i pretty much don't i release almost all of them i encourage everybody that I fish with to release but sometimes I think it is important for us to keep fish for the reasons I mentioned earlier it kind of makes you think about your meat sources especially if you're a meat eater a little bit differently you start looking at your food in a completely different light and having a different kind of respect for the food as well so I think there's something to be said about that. The last time I kept fish was actually kind of recently. It was the first time that I kept any fish this year. And that was when Jeremy, who was working with me on a book, he was over here. We were working on a book project. And I took him up to one of those streams that pretty much never see anybody. It was a little far, but we drove up there. And that's actually the the second time when I noticed that that stream was not producing the cutthroats that I had been seeing previously and I started noticing that this brook trout were very aggressive there was a lot of them which I knew already but we did not catch a single cutthroat the entire day and a fairly good stretch of the river the stream and and it was also you know a good opportunity to do it because I had talked to Jeremy and he had actually never kept a trout that he caught.

21:37He, you know, and I had, we had been talking, I believe, about cooking trout in the Japanese style. And I told him about how I, you know, if I, when I do keep fish, I clean it without even using a knife. I just use a stick and I skewer the fish and I cook, I prepare it over a fire using sea salt, uh sprinkled on the on the skin i'll post a video on how to how to clean a fish without a knife if you're interested on the tenkarausa.com forward slash podcast page for this episode uh but he was really curious about that he let me know that he never kept the fish and i'm like oh wow we gotta keep a couple of fish here for tonight and and and then we started catching fish and he caught one that was a good size about probably nine inches and I taught him how to kill the fish in a very quick hopefully humanely humane way and he killed the fish and I taught him how to clean it and we cleaned it we took it home and then I taught him how to skewer the fish just by using this technique that I learned in Japan as well and I'll post a video on how to do that as well on this page and we put some sea salt on the skin we cooked it over a fire that we built in my backyard and we really honored that and I could see that in Jeremy's face that I think his relationship with his food for that meal was very different you know there was something that told me that he was tasting the fish in a very different way than any other fish he's tried in his life so there's something about that as well uh to do that and that was the last time i kept fish uh just a few weeks ago first time this year but now let me talk a little bit about catch and release because that is what i do most that it's what i like to encourage people to do catch and release is extremely important because nowadays we just have a lot of pressure on streams i mean if you're if everybody's gonna keep a fish from boulder creek here in boulder which is a large population center the stream can literally be wiped out in a season i mean there's not a whole lot of stocking if any right now uh that goes on in boulder can boulder canyon especially close up population center there's always a lot of anglers there um i'm a very strong advocate for catching and releasing fish in that kind of situation and but i think it's important that we look at catch and releases uh best practices because it's not just catch and release you have to do it well otherwise you're gonna have dead fish anyways the mortality of fish when you're catching them on the fly luckily is smaller than if you're using bait because the fish are not taking a fly quite as deep and but there's a few best practices that you have to be very aware of otherwise there's absolutely no difference in you catching and keeping your catching and releasing so pretty simple stuff actually but you know start from the beginning once you catch a fish bring it to hand as quickly as you can don't fight it to exhaustion and i think that's one one of the things that Tenkara is beautiful at the fish can't take any line away from you and it's pretty quick to land just about any fish I've seen too many people with a rod and reel letting the fish kind of take a little bit of line just because they were you know they thought that the fight was fun and they wanted to feel the tug a little bit longer and that's just not very cool you know so with Tenkara luckily if we try to like let the line go chances are the fish is going to come off uh kind of quickly because of slack but just keep the tension on the line bring the fish in as quickly as you can uh in a reasonable way with tenkara you can bring it in pretty quickly quickly it helps to have barbless hooks i am a big advocate of barbless hooks all the flies that we sell tenkara you say are barbless because he makes the removal of the hook much easier and sometimes when people have barbs on their hook and they're holding the fish and maybe squeezing the fish and that kind of thing and it you know struggling to take the hook off that's not very good so barbless barbless hooks are pretty much imperative in my opinion um before you touch the fish wet your hands please that's a big one a lot of people are not very aware of it but if you have a dry hand and you touch the fish there's a good chance you're going to remove someone that kind of slimy protective coat out of a fish's body and in turn they might be more susceptible to getting fungi you know fungus to kind of take over them or some bacteria built up and that kind of thing so watch your hand before touching the fish and then hold the fish gently. I've seen this very often sometimes when people are new to fishing, they tend to try to grab the fish from above. And if you try to grab the fish from above, like if you imagine an eagle, you know, that comes and tries to, like an osprey maybe, tries to catch a fish from the top, it's really hard to kind of control the fish and you're going to end up squeezing the fish. So make sure to slide your hand below the belly of the fish very gently and don't squeeze the fish just kind of let it rest on your hand and with time you start getting a little bit better controlling it some fish tend to be a little bit more jumpy some fish a little easier to handle but just go below it cup the hand you know below the fish and try to hold it gently as you remove the hook a gnat can be super helpful because you don't have to struggle as much if the fish it kind of flops out of your hand it falls right back into the net just make sure that to keep the net in the water as much as you can as opposed to lifting it out of the water and then you kind of do your work removing the hook hopefully quickly and at this point you have the fish out of the hook don't really spend time posing for pictures if you want to get a quick picture get the photographer to get ready and let you know before you even lift the fish out of the water. If you want to do your photo, take a photo. But I like to recommend that you do the keep them wet photos where you have the fish pretty much in the water. And, you know, if you feel compelled to lift it, do it very, very quickly and above the water.

28:17Not crazy about images of fish laying on the grass, laying on the bank, because it does dry up their mucus and gets them to suffer later on possibly. So do it gently over the water. And then when you're ready to release it, get the fish to face the flow of the water. So essentially get them to face the currents so that water can come through their gills and oxygenate them and that kind of thing. And they're going to go into the current. And when you release it, it's best to release it in moving water, like slightly heavier currents so that the water is going through them. And there's some people that, or some studies that indicate that releasing them in the currents helps reduce the lactic acid buildup or one of the acid buildups and that kind of thing. So bring it in quickly, wet your hand, remove that barbless hook off and put it into the stream facing the current so that the current is coming in into its face and that way you're going to ensure that that fish that you released and you and i'm uh you know you'll be happy uh that to know that that fish had a much higher chance of survival uh than if you didn't do those things so if you're catching and releasing fish uh might as well follow some best practices and release them to survive for many years hopefully or months or whatever you'll take in a particular area. I did, this is not going to be a short cast it looks like, I'm about 30 minutes, I'm not going to call it a short cast after all. I did ramble on about my approach to catching and keeping fish and also you know some of the things to keep in mind for catching and release.

30:10I will ask you all to release as many fish as you can if you're going to go fishing especially if you're fishing very often I'm sure that's already part of your ethos if you do decide to keep fish keep only what you're going to eat for the night or for the lunch for your lunch you know usually for between my wife and I will keep one fish each occasionally we'll keep one extra to share but most of the time um just one fish each and um yeah just release as many fish as you can and encourage your friends to do so uh we we don't have much of a reason to keep a lot of fish these days so thanks for listening to my rambling thoughts again on the Tenkara Cast uh one day i might get away from rambling as much and i might do some more fun kind of storytelling that i'm intending to do but there's a list of topics that i do want to cover and i'll try to keep plugging them away and rambling on all right hopefully uh you'll have some good food for thought here on your next fishing outings if you're interested in catching and keeping fish i'll share those videos on a couple of ways to uh to clean them uh be humane be respectful and whenever you can do release them so that other anglers can enjoy the the joy of fishing as well until next time everyone on the Tenkara Cast and as always I'd like to thank our friend Nick Ogawa Takenobu you can find his music at takenobumusic.com I'll put a link on our website this is a song called Fishing have things very appropriate.

32:05It's a song that made me learn about his work and totally fell in love with his music ever since. Thank him for letting us share his music here on the podcast. Take a look. He's got four beautiful albums on his website. So enjoy the rest of the song and listen to it on your next drive when you go fishing. Thank you. Thank you.