Hey, Mark, I'm going to have to get on my soapbox.
I hate to sound like a pain in the butt, but it's EXTREMELY frustrating to know someone would pull up research nets that are currently fishing. One of our nets today, yes I helped set them, was pulled way off its location. I don't know if you touched that one, but it screwed up our day at that site and we will have to reset it because it was fishing in the wrong depth and all tangled up. That is an extra day of taxpayer's money toward our research. We have only had our nets obviously tampered with one other time in the four years I have been working in this group.
And regarding the smallmouth, I am not sure which net you are talking about, but unless you picked the fish out by hand, we only picked 2 smallmouth out of the 6 nets we set yesterday. One was about 3 pounds, and the other about 1.5. They came from a net set just south of Coleman Point. Smallmouth by their shape and nature, don't get caught in gillnets very often, and I can say that in hundreds of days of gillnetting on various lakes, if you get more than 3 in a net, you have had a rare day. If 6 fell out because you pulled up the net and they flopped out, which is rare but possible, then those fish were truly wasted.
For anybody wondering what the research is for, we are looking at predation on juvenile chinook that enter the south end of the lake from the Cedar River. We are setting near creek mouths and other areas that harbor small chinook this time of year. The samples caught for diet analysis are also being used in a contaminant study for the state to see if the fish people catch and eat in Lake Washington are full of PCB's and Mercury. No, I don't personally feel like this is a waste of fish.
The moral of the story, please don't touch a research net. It is a potential waste of our time, and a waste of the people's money paying for the project, in this case, the City of Seattle and State of Washington.
Chris Sergeant
P.S. If you want more information on this project, send me a private message.
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