Hey "FishDoc"--- would you take offense if I politely asked you to change your avatar? I find flaunting large mature DEAD rockfish to be patently obscene, especially Canary and Yelloweye. Whether the regs support keeping them or not is immaterial--- they have been hammered by the commercial fleet over the years and their populations are hanging on by a slender thread (or a distended air sack) .
RCA's are an attempt to try and bring them back but their populations are under constant pressure with or without those RCA's ----------- flaunting large dead ones (these fish can live to be 75 years old !!!) does NOTHING to promote the conservation dynamic for these species
Black rockfish populations are far more robust and there is ZERO difference in taste. How about beating up on those instead?
I have never made such a request on a Public Forum and I hope you don't feel insulted or belittled by this post. However, I recall that you (or a similar guy also named "FishDoc" ) posted on the old FishBC forum, and in those posts, also chose to flaunt pictures of large piles of dead Canary and Yelloweye and Shortraker rockfish --- I seem to recall that several members of the Forum took that FishDoc guy to task for those pictures (and at the time, I thought to myself---good, I'm not the only one who is offended by large piles of dead rockfish) ---
I think conventional wisdom these days is that the days of our "heroes" such as Earnest Hemingway (who was lauded for the large piles of dead animals he left behind everywhere he went) are over and done with.
More and more fishermen are starting to realize how fragile those rockfish populations and are. They are starting to realize that harvesting them should no longer be considered even if they have the regulatory option to do so---- to the contrary, the push now is rather then getting a hero shot, the drill is but how to safely get them off the hook and return them back to the depths of their natural habitat by using various devices that mitigate "barotrauma" (allowing the dis-tended air sac to be pulled back into the body cavity once they re-regulate at proper depth)
For more information on mitigating barotrauma, I respectfully refer you to the following website:
http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=fishingsportfishinginfo.rockfishconservation
We all have been guilty of hero shots of salmon (me included) but it seems clear that the decision of whether to harvest or safely release a fourteen inch Canary rockfish (that took seven years of growth to reach that size!!!!!), should be given long and serious thought by the contemporary well-informed fisherman.
Click on web adress -----> http://www.uclueletcharters.com/west-coast-fishing-reports
.
. The in fighting between recreational anglers will be the end of us 
.
