Thread: Not a crappie! Not a crappie!

A family license always used to include all children under 16 for nonresidents, but residents under 16 have long been able to fish and keep their own limits without a license. Anyway last year the legislature allowed even nonresident children under 16 to take a limit without a license; so even that point is moot for either resident or non-resident. Individual licenses allow 10 crappies each, but there were a whole pile of kids involved, parents and even grandparents, and I would be willing to bet that every couple gets a family license rather than two individual ones. Toss in the occasional sunny with 20 of those allowed for each legal fisherman. If they had the necessary resident licenses between family and individual types, there were enough of them to accumulate some pails full of legal fish and in pretty short order when the prespawn runs are right. These folks are not wealthy and though I don't like it, they are probably quite legal. Anyway I am not going to go up and down the line asking to see licenses. They would have been tickled pink to have been given the carp, too, but I don't give away fish except to some very few aging relatives and then rarely. I know these folks a little bit and I expect that they are very careful to be properly licensed, even if that is a bit of a budget bite for them. The number of these folks in a party or a related group of parties almost has to be seen to be believed.

They have also become quite good at fishing plastics; so their bait expense is also very low. They are well known to do this very thing and are watched by the wardens, too, as well as a lot of the rest of us. I will leave the enforcement to the wardens, although I wish the legalities were changed a bit more in favor of the crappies.

Interestingly when their young people fish by themselves many of them release most or all of their fish, more of them all the time, in fact. When the family is out though I suspect that parents and grandparents demand keeping everything. Actually the grandmothers seem to be managing these group harvests and in that group nobody argues with grandma, not when it comes to food. The amount of crappie harvest for them repays their license fees several times over just in the pre-spawn. Like I also said I am sure that every fish kept gets eaten. They are not folks to waste food.

Personally I don't like it, but a while back I sat down and pictured how much of several 5 gallon pails their legal limits of crappies and bluegills would amount to, and it is quite a lot. I saw a lot of crappies last evening in the buckets, but I would have to guess that the limits were probably not half filled at that.