Quote:
Originally Posted by big jay
Am I totally crazy here -- when the heck did it become written in stone that Bass Fishing now is in the toilet?
Reading all these posts it seems like there are no bass and the fishery is dieing.
I'm normally not this bold online, but I had a kick-ass '09 season, and so did most all of the guys I hang out with/talk to.
I don't get this.
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Just guessing here, so please excuse me if I'm wrong. But, based in RI and fishing out of Sandwich you likely had a decent season in CCB and Race Point. You were likely helped by the use of hi grade sonar, GPS, radar, and cell phone contacts. You had access to and the knowledge of a remaining center or body of fish that allowed you to be successful. Guys on BI had something similar. Huge areas in between and to the periphery of that body of fish had nothing. THAT is the sign of trouble.
When fish begin to dwindle, it is the periphery and less bait intensive areas that show the strain first. Ask the guys in Maine how the fishing was. The North Shore. Vineyard Sound. Buzzards Bay.
Consider also 30 years ago. Guys would hammer bass all summer in CCB, just like this year........but while they were doing so guys would be hammering bass behind the Vineyard, off Monomoy, the outer cape, the North Shore, the merrimac, NH, Maine, Narragansett, etc.
That no longer happens, even though there are more people fishing with far better fish finding equipment.
Guys like Cow Hunter have a twisted perspective on things. They are smart fisherman and very competitive. With live/dead bait, advanced electronics, developed networks, mobile rigs, and lots of effort they are able to access and hammer the remaining mass of fish quite successfully. They forget that 30-40 years ago, without any of those tools, many many more people were even more successful than they are now.
Not that they would care. The scarcity of fish drives up the value of what they can still catch. It makes their services as a charter captain worth paying for. $800 for a charter is much easier to justify when each customer comes home with 20-30 lbs of fish worth $10-12/lb. Likewise, the travel and gas expense is well worth it for commercial guys when the price of fish is high........and scarcity keeps the price of fish high.
For most people, however, fishing is not about making money or paying customers, it is about a pleasant diversion from the substantial stress in the rest of their lives. A scarcity of fish ruins that for them. Either they can move on to something else, or they can use their numbers and votes to change the system that ignores them..........at the expense of the guys who profit from a depleted resource.