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Recycling the Resource: Tag Return
May 12th, I caught this 31" striper which was tagged about 38 months prior in Delaware Bay. Not too shabby: 8 to 9" growth in three years. I scored this free hat. I didn't kill the fish or remove the tag. So, it is still swimming around, recording data so to speak.
I'm glad I was alone so nobody could witness the shennanagans I went through in the pre dawn dark. The tag was covered in weed. I'm scraping off the tag by flashlight, squinting with my old eyes at the microscopic writing on the spaghetti tag at the six digit tag number, and the reporting address with the five digit zip code. Now, my aging memory is so bad that I am writing all of this stuff in the sand above the high tide line so I don't forget it. By the time I finished the fishing there, I had the info sufficiently memorized; but I had to return to the sand writing three times to be sure of it.
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