Sampson: Remember, fishing is about stocking up on fun, not just fillets
Hopefully by now everyone who likes to put some fish in their freezer for the winter has had a successful enough season that they don’t have to worry about going hungry between now and next spring.
A lot of anglers don’t realize how much of a good position that puts them in. Fishermen who have shed the burden of worrying about putting “something in the box” can now focus on nothing more than having fun while catching fish.
If you’re not worried about bringing something home, who cares if the rockfish you just caught is one inch under the 28-inch limit? It was a heck of a lot fun hooking and fighting it, and the fact that someone else would classify it as a “short” does nothing to diminish the wonderful experience you had catching it.
Think about it — once your freezer is well stocked you no longer have to worry about size or creel limits or whether or not the season is open because everything you catch is going to go back anyway.
The last I checked, there was no regulation that limited anglers to having “only so much fun” while fishing. Once you’ve met your needs for food you’re free to fish for anything you want even if it’s not a fish you like to eat.
So what if flounder are biting like crazy up in the Thorofare, if you’re having fun catching searobins at the Route 50 bridge — stay there and enjoy yourself!
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With the end of the 2017 season peeking over the horizon, a lot of anglers have a precious few days left that they’ll be able to get out on the water and have fun while trying to catch a fish or two.
So if you ask me, I’d say that now is surely the time to start milking every drop of enjoyment possible from every outing, and that would have to start with not worrying about bringing anything home.
That could also could call for a tackle change as some anglers will want to swap their big, heavy, “crank-em-in” meat sticks for lighter tackle that’s better for casting a variety of smaller lighter lures and provides a much sportier fight when they hook a fish.
Anglers looking for this kind of unfettered fun can probably find it down around the inlet as well as the Route 50 and Route 90 bridges.
Right now there’s some big keeper-size rockfish in the bay, but there’s also a lot of throwbacks — anglers should enjoy those smaller fish because in a month or two they’ll be wishing they could spend an afternoon picking away at them.
By working soft plastic jigs or diving plugs around the bridge pilings and inlet jetties anglers can have a ball and probably catch a lot more fish than they could if they were targeting the larger fish with live bait.
I wouldn’t be surprised to hear of anglers using small bucktails or spoons to catch a few hickory shad and small bluefish beneath working birds. The shad are made to order for this type of fishing because they’re loads of fun to catch, aren’t very good to eat, and don’t have an open season anyway.
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Very soon anglers will probably start to find that they can hook big migrating rockfish and monster bluefish 5-10 miles offshore. But of course, since those fish are out beyond the 3-mile limit anglers may not legally keep any of the rockfish.
But fishermen who aren’t fishing for food don’t need to worry about that because they’re not going to keep anything anyway, right?
Too often fishermen get so riled up about catch limits and other regulations that a lot of the fun of fishing gets lost in the conflict. Who knows, maybe after having so much fun not worrying about size limits and feeding the freezer some anglers will wish to carry the practice and the fun right into next season — when the freezer isn’t so full!