I've often wondered if using the gear I use on the pier instead of the trolling gear most use today would make a difference in the fight and therefore the potential mortality rate of any released fish. With the lighter gear, doesn't it stand to reason that you won't necessarily be dragging a smaller fish for who knows how long before you noticed that rod
might have a fish on it because with the lighter gear, almost any hit is going to be much more noticeable, isn't it?
I don't own any "trolling rods" of any kind. (yet
) I have 110 yards of line on all my reels on my fishing rods. (All but two have 10 or 15lb braid. The other two have 12lb mono because my son keeps losing/breaking his rods, ie his dog ate his ugly stik earlier this year, or so he told me,
and IF I take him, he doesn't like the braided line so he'll use one with the mono on it and then complain mightily when I out fish him, again
)
110 yards is 330 ft. Surely that's enough to troll with out there out of Bruce, Burwell, Glascow etc, when you consider the deepest part of the lake is only 210 ft deep off the tip of Long Point and extending east.
When I was a kid that's all we had, so that's all we used. We never had the trolling rods, the riggers, the dipseys etc and we managed to put fish in the boat (when dad had it) and if my memory is telling me the truth, they seemed to fight better on that gear than they seem to using the trolling rods etc most used today. I also know from helping land over 50 walleye off the pier with my landing net over the past 4-5 years (no I still haven't nailed one myself off the pier,) that they do seem to fight a little better, or so it appears, than they do when I've been out in the boat with others using the trolling gear.
Now that said, when reeling in a 7 or 8+lb fish (or bigger) on 10 colors, you're probably going to feel like that fish fought extraordinarily hard even if it didn't.
When it comes to keeping smaller fish I catch on the pier, I generally don't like to keep perch smaller than 7 inches and even that small I try not to keep, but if they've taken the hook deep, I will, because I know, especially if they're already bleeding, they took the hook deep thus committing suicide and they're not going to survive if I release them. I would think the same thing applies to walleye and bows. If they take it deep, they're possibly not going to survive, so I'd keep them. But if it's just in their lips or the jaw bone, provided the air bladder hasn't blown, they'll likely survive IF you revive them properly before releasing, which generally means, you hold it by the tail and gently move it side to side and back and forth in the water until it swims away from you on its own.
