Catch and Release vs. Catch and Eat

A moment for personal pride. See that hefty striped bass on the right and the goofy goober holding it? That's me. (The person, not the fish, natch.) I caught that 50-inch cow in the Chesapeake Bay from my kayak. Had I flipped I would encourage you to nominate me for the Darwin Awards. It was 25 degrees with flurries and we were fishing at night. Not an Einstein moment, but those huge stripers are in the Bay for only one month a year and the fishing, like most pleasures in life, is better when the sun goes down.

After a solid fight and a couple of photographs, I released her back into the black waters. Ten years ago I would have drug her to the shore and fileted the meat for a proper fish fry. And the fellow anglers that were out there with me seemed shocked that I wasn't prepping the grill. On the drive home a toll booth operator asked if I had caught anything. I said yes and showed him a picture.

"Did you keep?" he asked. "Heck no," I said. The expression on my face must have been especially foul like when you order a sturgeon caviar and a clumsy waiter brings you salmon roe instead. I'm sure you understand. The toll booth man seemed equally horrified with my apparent soft spine. Note to self: get an EZ Pass.

His reaction got me thinking though about releasing versus eating.


It's not that I've lost a taste for fish, but my ethic for what to kill and what to let swim away has been honed over the years. And the generalized rule is size matters. The bigger the fish, the more reason to let it go.

On a simple level, bigger fish generally don't taste as good. Plus, the larger and older they are, the more mercury has built up in the skin and bones. That's reason number one not to eat them. And I don't know what I would do with that much fish. There aren't enough contacts in my phone to use up all the filets. I've kept smaller stripers, though I don't think they taste very good either, but at least I wasn't wasting pounds and pounds of meat.

Second, any fish that has survived for so long has laid a lot of eggs and is on her way to do it again. Sport fish numbers are hurting. There's no need to deprive nature of one more minnow-producing machine.

And finally I'm reminded of a boyhood lesson. When you get in a tussle you don't humiliate your opponent. You compete and then leave the scene as equals, no matter who won. On that cold Chesapeake night, when I was lucky enough to have something so big and powerful tug at the end of the line it only seems right that the affair end in a draw.