Mike Schoonveld: Boating fatality numbers at all-time low
I am a frequent boater and have been most of my life. I don’t think of boating as a particularly unsafe activity (it’s not) but I also don’t think of it as more or less safe now than when I started boating decades ago.
Recent statistics released by the U.S. Coast Guard changed that mindset. According to the USCG, in the past 50 years or so boating safety has increased dramatically.
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Mike Schoonveld: Can fish get school immunity?
Before COVID-19 was unleashed on humanity, I’m not sure if I’d ever heard of the term, “herd immunity.” Now, I know it’s the layman’s term for the phenomenon that occurs when a significant portion of a population has been exposed to (and survived) diseases caused by pathogenic germs and viruses.
Fortunately, herd immunity is real in fish and wildlife populations. Perhaps in fish it should be called “school immunity.”
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Mike Schoonveld: All lost fish are big ones: Prove me wrong!
I saw a friend’s Facebook post recently in which he was showing off his first ever Chinook salmon.
He said it weighed 16 pounds then explained he’d hooked another but it tangled in a downrigger wire and broke off. He then reported, “The captain said it was easily 20 pounds.”
I posted a comment to his remarks, “Every salmon that breaks the line and swims free weighs at least 20 pounds.”
Obviously, that’s not always the case, but it’s almost impossible to prove. Almost!
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Mike Schoonveld: Some noteworthy highlights from recently-published Lake Michigan report
The Cooperative Science and Monitoring Initiative – CSMI – is a binational effort by the United States and Canada to coordinate Great Lakes research and monitoring activities that help guide resource managers with the science necessary to make sound management decisions.
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Mike Schoonveld: Nighttime fishing requires abiding by common-sense rules and knowing your insurance policy
There’s an “old saying” coined not long after the start of the Internet era in the 1990s that is simple: “Don’t believe everything you see or read on the Internet.”
Great advice and advice that most Internet users have learned to heed. Still, it’s not all that uncommon for fake news to go viral, or old news to be found in recent posts as though it’s new news. It happened again recently when I got a note on Facebook Messenger from a friend who asked me, “Have you seen this?”
Mike Schoonveld: How you clean fish impacts the flavor of your fish
I remember the first fish I ever caught that someone cleaned for me and I got to eat it. My grandpa laid the tiny sunfish on the counter, used a spoon to scrape off the scales, chopped off the head and slit the belly open to pull out the entrails.
My dad wasn’t a fisherman and grandpa didn’t live close so I was mostly a self-taught angler. And since that’s how I was taught to clean fish and since the local ponds near my hometown were full of small sunfish, that’s how I cleaned fish I caught for the next dozen years or so.
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Mike Schoonveld: Fishing for food seals the deal in becoming a lifelong angler
I caught my first fish when I was a second grader when a family friend invited me to go fishing with him.
Geared up with cane poles and a can of worms, we went to a local pond filled with stunted bluegills. The action was fast with the bobbers going down seconds after I lowered the heavy pole. Fun, exciting – sure, but that wasn’t what sealed the deal for me to become a life-long fisherman. That came when my grandparents took me to “the river” to go fishing. “We’ll catch us some fish for supper,” grandpa said.
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Mike Schoonveld: Are lake sturgeon an endangered species?
The US Fish and Wildlife Service has until June 30 to decide if America’s lake sturgeon populations should be added to their list of species so close to extinction they deserve extra protection under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act.
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Even for ‘old school’ anglers, electric knives provide an enlightening cleaning experience
I learned how to fillet fish when I was in the Boy Scouts, and the Scouts also taught me how to sharpen my fillet knife and keep it sharp.
Since then, I couldn’t count the number of fish I’ve cleaned using a standard fillet knife. I’ve cut up tiny bluegills with them and bluefin tuna that took two men to flop onto the fish-cleaning table. The first time I saw a guy with an electric knife at a fish cleaning station, I thought, “Humf, that guy must have never been a Boy Scout.”
