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I remember when they first put bass back in. No daily/weekly prizes whatsoever. Top 3 shore/boat places got plaques only, and the winners weren't eligible for the Grand Prize. That'd be a good start. I also think you could only weigh in 3 during the run of the Derby, but I'm not sure. Having a Derby-long restriction would keep people from weighing in 20# bass, and it should keep people from weighing in 7# albies. Take them out of the Grand Slam picture, too.
The other problem I see is that albies and bones often feed together, and that a certain percentage of the folks who enter the Derby will always have a problem with "species identification" between the two tunoids. It's easy for experienced fishermen to tell the difference, but that isn't the case across the board. You'll always have albie by-catch when people target bonito, and they aren't the easiest fish to release. I was fishing with a bunch of guys once behind Pogue Light, and one of them caught a micro albie--about 4#s. He landed it within 5 minutes, never took it out of the water, and it went straight to the bottom when he released the tail.
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