The end of bass tournaments?

Published 10:25 am Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Not likely. But an influential player on the national tournament scene is at least taking a look at the subject and coming up with some adverse opinion.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, while surveying anglers about a proposed long-term bass management plan, apparently f

ound there are more folks out there opposed to tournaments than they had previously thought.

Bob Wattendorf in Berkley’s Fishing Wire said the survey found fishermen concerned about exploitation of the resource, with congestion at launch ramps, with the numbers of bass that die after release

and, especially, the impact of interfering with bedding bass.

Wattendorf said one angler felt tournaments shouldn’t be continued if they don’t overwhelmingly benefit the state, but another respondent held the opposite view: that high-profile tournaments draw worldwide attention to Florida’s fisheries, boost local economies, and provide great public relations to the bass resource Florida offers.

A third survey participant said, according to Wattendorf, that during and after weigh-ins, bass are kept out of the water far too long. “Go to a tournament site the next morning and look at all the dead bass floating in the water,” the participant said.

Wattendorf said big-time tournament bassing groups have helped promote catch-and-release fishing and educated the public about conservation issues. They require tournament anglers to take good care of the bass they catch and to release everything, after weigh-in, and penalize the fisherman for any dead fish.

Competitive bass fishing is very popular in Florida, Wattendorf said, and has profound economic impacts locally and statewide. The 2005 BassMaster Classic on the Kissimmee Chain of Lakes generated an estimated $25 million for the community during the three-day event, he said.

A couple of the stickier issues raised by the survey concerned bass being released in bodies of water, or areas of the same body of water, other than those in which they were caught, and the fact that because release is required by the tournament, the state often exempts participants from size-limit regulations, including slot limits.

All of that, along with a tournament mortality rate sometimes found to be as high as 26-28 percent, can affect the abundance and size of fish available to the public, say those opposed to competitive fishing.
Wattendorf said the Florida commission’s objective is to ensure sustainable bass populations. Tournaments won’t affect that, he said, but they could alter the quality of a local fishery. Moreover, this is a resource-allocation issue, so sharing of public resources in an equitable manner and social considerations need also to be weighed.

Florida studied the same issues in the 1980s and again in the ‘90s, Wattendorf said, and found no significant impacts. Additionally, an FWC team is testing alterenative solutions, such as “digital tournaments” where, with smart-phone technology, fish can be photographed on official rulers, date-stamped and the location plotted with GPS accuracy, enabling the angler to release his catch immediately.

While Washington is a minor player on the national tournament scene, a lively and viable competitive bass fishery here prompts all these same concerns from time to time, and it will be interesting to see what a heavyweight with Florida’s clout elects to do.