Catch-and-release Imposes a Powerful Code
Patrick Durkin 10.17.13
Tom Heberlein pulled an elk roast from his cast-iron pot, plopped it onto a platter, and poured the pot’s steaming potatoes and vegetables over the tenderly-roasted meat.
Heberlein left it to me, Rich Bishop, and Jim Simonson to decide how much pot roast to pile on our plates. Two or three bites later, we praised Heberlein’s cooking and asked him to forward our thanks to his friend Paul Grover for sending the elk meat northward. We wouldn’t be eating so well if Grover hadn’t shot the elk with Simonson when visiting him in Colorado.
A couple of nights later, Heberlein had some serious explaining to do when the menu featured fresh muskellunge. Yes, he would be serving Wisconsin’s state fish; its finned saint, its swimming symbol and piscatorial poster-spawn of catch-and-release fishing.
I was jealous, of course. I had returned home after the elk feast, forsaking the chance to fish muskies for four days. Although Heberlein’s crew did not set out to catch a muskie for dinner, Simonson lost one on the operating-room table, so to speak.
Hey, it happens, and spare us the judgmental emails claiming you’ve never had a muskie die on you. If you haven’t, keep fishing. Your turn will come.
So, why was I jealous? I’ve never tasted muskie, but I remember reading a Steve Hopkins column in the Wisconsin State Journal about 40 years ago when he proclaimed muskies high-end table fare. Simonson’s misfortune and Heberlein’s frying pan offered a rare chance at guilt-free muskie dining.
After all, in muskie fishing today, we expect the fish’s release, no matter its size. Eating sacred muskie flesh is only acceptable after trying everything short of artificial resuscitation, Heimlich maneuvers, blood transfusions, and electric paddles to save its life.
My system can’t handle a steady diet of catch-and-release fishing and the attitudes it spawns. I enjoy eating fish too much, and I hate fretting about other folks’ assumptions and expectations. Maybe that’s why I only occasionally row my cedar boat for trout and muskies.
If there’s a Hell for muskie fanatics and fly fishermen, it’s stocked with hatchery salmon, and you can only motor-troll. Salmon hooked 75 yards or farther behind boats usually fight to their death, literally. You’ll die of guilt eternally if catch-and-release is your salmon-fishing ethic.
But the catch-and-release ethic is powerful, just ask Heberlein. In his book, Navigating Environmental Attitudes, he writes:
Just how powerful? A while back I started fishing for [muskies] near my North Woods cabin. Muskies are hard to catch, and for several years I caught none. My dad and uncles also fished for muskies. These fish are so big and mean that when old-timers brought them alongside the boat, they shot them with a .22 pistol rather than net them. That ruled out catch-and-release. The muskie’s white meat was especially prized in camp, and I can remember eating beer-battered muskie fillets as a boy.
Therefore, I told fishing buddies and anyone else who would listen that when I caught my first legal muskie, I would kill it and eat it as a sacrament to honor my father and uncles. And then, on a windy November day on the blue waters of a nameless lake in Ashland County [Wisconsin], it happened. I held my first legal muskie for a quick picture. And released it. I stood there a little amazed. … Such is the power of [catch-and-release expectations].
I envy the late conservation legend Aldo Leopold, who wrote of guilt-free fly fishing in northern Wisconsin on the “Alder Fork,” in A Sand County Almanac. After spotting a large trout surfacing in an upstream pool, Leopold patiently plotted:
For the duration of a cigarette I sit on a rock midstream – and watch my trout rise under his guardian bush. … [Then] with cat-like care not to roil his majesty’s bath, I step in, and stand stock-still for five minutes to let things calm down. … I blow upon my fly to give it one last fluff, lay it on the stream at my feet, and quickly pay out coil after coil. … I hear, rather than see, the rush of the great fish; I set hard, and the battle is on. … I got him up into open water, and finally aboard the creel. … None of [my] trout had to be beheaded, or folded double, to fit their casket.
Yes, I realize we wouldn’t have many of the trout and muskie fisheries we enjoy today without catch-and-release, whether it’s done with size regulations, small bag limits, or judgmental stares and commentary. It has its place and serves a purpose.
But it has limits. As Ron Leys, former outdoor editor at the Milwaukee Journal, said about 25 years ago: “If everything goes to catch-and-release, it will kill fishing. People need direct connections to Earth’s food.”
In fact, catch-and-release is a luxury. It’s not practiced by the poor, or in our world’s impoverished, resource-depleted corners. Westerners do it because we can afford it, and we have alternative fish to fry.
So, let’s not pretend it’s natural, intrinsically spiritual, and deserving of adoring applause. In Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter, Steven Rinella writes:
Catch-and-release fishing amounts to poking a hole into a fish’s face and exhausting it, then letting it go because you don’t want to hurt it. … If you rolled back human history to the very beginning and let our species have another go at it … catch-and-release would almost certainly join the ranks of high-heeled shoes and wearing your pants down around your hips so that you’ve got to walk funny to keep them from falling down.
And yet Rinella, too, enjoys the thrills of catching and releasing bonefish, steelhead, and other fish. It’s complex stuff, this catch-and-release, and most of us can’t explain why we accept its code some days and forsake it on others.
When we can explain such things with certainty, perhaps we cease being human. Or at least fishermen.
