Hey Tim, this is my long but short reply to your Facebook comment ‘they do most of the damage’ (pro’s) this portrayal is based on observations over the years and not just opinion…

I used to live in a small coastal town that had (and still claims to have) the best estuary fishery in Victoria. The pro's had always netted the system since the establishment of the town and took it upon themselves with no help from fisheries (DNRE, DNE, DPI or whatever they will call themselves later in the day, tomorrow, next week or whenever (I wish I had their rebranding contract)) to regulate their resource by implementing permanent and seasonal no fishing areas, shot limits and of course size limits. The system is made up of two large lakes with two main rivers that join into one, together with several creeks that feed into the lake/s arms. Back in the day when I was in my late teens/early twenties my daily results within this fishery was amazing especially when it came to big duskies (70-80cm) but for many that visited the area they found it a tough place to get results and would simply blame the commercial fishers.

The fact is most holiday makers do/did not know how to catch fish properly and would occasionally fluke a few. The whole time the pro's were and had been working the system with little affect to the dusky populations even within the areas that they worked but the biggest specimens did come from the areas that they did not. This could be argued that the larger duskies tend to reside in the upper lake and arms of the system.

At the time there was little research allocation into these systems apart from catch and effort data from commercial fishers and still to this date there are no restocking programs in place to help with the additional pressure from recreational fishers. This dusky fishery has since gone downhill significantly and I can personally pinpoint it; that reason is actually shown within the image at the top of the Facebook post which you posted on that I am replying to.

Back to when I was in my late teens/early twenties… I used to fish with a mate who was one of only two people on the system who used an electric motor, it was a bow mounted (custom made bow bracket) tiller steer with the head turned 180 degrees so we could steer it with our foot, I may as well add here that 95% of our fishing was with hard bodies of which most were home made as at the time there were only a handful of hard bodies available to buy of which were trout lures. This is where the downfall began…

Where I used to live the only place to buy tackle was at either of the two service stations or at the general store and their range was very minimal, so we used to go up the coast to a tackle store that had a better range of trout hard bodies. When we used to frequent this particular store we eventually became friends with one of the sales guys who is these days a ‘celebrity’ angler and heavily involved in the tackle industry with his own products. Eventually this guy used to come looking for us checking boat ramp car parks for our car and trailer then find us and follow us around as he was infatuated with the fact that we had cracked the code to fooling big bream, estuary perch, bass and duskies into taking artificials he would try his hardest to get as much info off us as he could and would fish literally meters from us until we put an end to it.

This guy together with another ‘celebrity’ angler eventually developed a range of products and ‘how to’ videos that became the benchmark of fishing infomercials. Back then there were many fishing magazines, publications and videos that would contain articles on areas and species but never really taught you how to get guaranteed results compared to these days with detailed ‘how to’ diagrams showing how to work certain lures in different terrain and videos that take it to a whole new level of marine environment vandalism.

A tough days fishing teaches and builds respect; spending huge amounts of time, effort and of course money searching for fish and honing techniques also teaches respect but when you give all that info away to the whole world the new comers who learn everything in five minutes do not have that same respect for these fragile systems.

The recreational angler has put so much pressure onto these fisheries since the marketing boom of fishing and boating in the late nineties into the thousands and to present; as we used to say… ‘You can teach them how to catch them but you can’t teach them to put them back’.

Over the last decade the areas that were never fished by commercial fishers (as they knew that the big breeding fish lived there and replenished populations (their livelihood)) are consistently visited by many recreational sports fishers even mid week and many of these big fish are taken for the table or glorification. The marketing of the fishing and boating industry to recreational anglers has put unforseen pressure onto estuaries and there are still no restocking programs!!

The original ‘inland’ fishing licence generated revenue that was utilised mainly for trout and cod restocking programs. At this time the licensee pool was significantly lower than what it is today. The government/s brains trusts are so controlled by political strategies that are driven by the demon dollar and votes that they will probably never resolve these problems and simply blame the pro’s!

I have fished for years in South Australia as well and first hand seen how the fishery gets publicised by certain programs showing the world how to catch big snapper on plastics and jigs. These so called sports fishers who have limited time away from every day commitments when they go for a session, catch one fish after the other and release them thinking they are doing a good thing compared to the pro’s. They are letting these fish go with expanded swim bladders; the fish cannot swim back down and eventually get attacked by birds, sharks or die from exhaustion on the surface. You can bag out without putting a line in the water by picking them up off the surface! The size/bag limit (in the area that I fish) is; minimum size 38 cm - bag limit of five and fish over 60cm the bag limit is two. I have been there some years and never hooked one under 60cm, my best fish is 106cm, 14kg caught in the middle of the day!

I apologise in advance if anyone is offended by these words and my lack of experience,

Peace