There’s a long history of record fish being eaten by the angler who caught it. The world record walleye, coho salmon, northern pike, and several others were all consumed after being weighed and measured, including the world record largemouth bass, which was famously eaten for three straight days by the angler’s family.
Many of these anglers hadn’t realized that their monstrous catches were records at the time and simply saw them as a grand prize for the dinner table. But when Andrew Oestringer caught what could have been the Vermont State Record smallmouth bass back in August, he not only didn’t realize the fish was a potential record breaker, he also never intended to eat it.
Tale of A Fish
When Oestringer launched his small kayak in the early morning on a local public pond near Ryegate, Vermont, he had no idea what would happen that morning. He was simply looking forward to a day pursuing one of his favorite fish.
“I’ve fished for smallmouth my whole life,” Oestringer told MeatEater. “Between fishing in Canada and Western Maryland and now Vermont, they became some of my favorite fish to hook into because they fight so hard and love topwater lures. I knew that pond had some big bass, but I had no idea there was one that big in there.”
Oestringer was paddling his kayak around and casting his favorite lure, the Heddon Tiny Torpedo, when the giant bass suddenly struck.
“I knew it was big as soon as it hit and leaped out of the water,” Oestringer said. “It fought like a beast and got all wrapped up in the weeds and it took me nearly 15 minutes to get it to the net. When I saw how big it was, I realized I’ve never seen a fish like that. I got excited. I’m almost 65 years old, but when I fish, I still feel and act like a 10-year-old. I looked down at this giant bass and knew I needed a picture of it.”
Oestringer is a man of the old school who doesn’t own a smartphone, and his old flip phone doesn’t take good pictures. So, holding the net with the bass in the water, he paddled one-handed over to a nearby beach where he could see a cabin with lights on, which showed someone was awake at 6:15 in the morning. He beached the kayak and, standing on the shoreline, called up to the cabin while holding the fish in the water until the owner came outside and agreed to take a picture of the fish and send it to his wife at home.
Then Oestringer took the bass down to the water to let it go, and tragically found out that the bass wasn’t going to survive.
“I’m primarily a catch-and-release angler,” Oestringer said. “Aside from yellow perch and a few trout, I try to let everything else that I catch go, especially a big smallmouth like that one, so they can be caught again. Unfortunately, the bass had been hooked deep, and my lure had gotten caught up in its gills. I hoped it would be okay and tried like hell to revive it, but it was too far gone. It crushed me to see a fish like that die; I had wanted to see it swim off. But there was nothing else I could do, so I did what I believed to be the responsible thing.”
The Responsible Angler
Once he realized that the bass had expired, Oestringer put the fish in his kayak and paddled back to the put-in. He loaded the boat and the bass into his vehicle and then returned home with the smallmouth to do what he felt was right.
“Even as a catch-and-release angler, you take a chance every time you catch a fish because it may die,” Oestringer told MeatEater. “I’m not someone who goes out and kills every fish I catch, and sometimes you mean to release a fish, and it dies, so you do the responsible thing and fillet it and cook it, which is what I did. It’s about not wasting meat and making the best out of a regrettable situation.”
According to Vermont Fisheries Biologist, Shawn Goode, taking the fish home and eating it was the responsible thing to do.
“Andrew attempted to let the fish go, but it struggled and wouldn’t swim away,” Goode told MeatEater. “So instead of leaving a large dead bass floating in the lake, he did the responsible thing, in my opinion, and took it home to eat.”
Before he cleaned the bass and after a bit of coaxing from his wife, Andrew decided to weigh it on a scale he had at home just to see how big it really was. When he saw 7lb 6oz on the scale, he knew it was the biggest smallmouth he had ever caught, but still had no idea the smallmouth was a potential record until after he had cleaned it.
“Several hours later, I suddenly wondered what the Vermont State Record was,” said Oestringer. “So, I went on my wife’s phone and looked it up and was absolutely shocked to see that the bass would have been the new record.”
While this revelation would have thrilled most other anglers, for Oestringer it was simply a bright end to what he considers to be a rough day on the water. Not only did the big bass die, but when the picture and story of Oestringer eating the bass were posted on the internet, Oestringer received a lot of backlash from the bass-loving public.
While Oestringer legally harvested the fish in public waters, people believe that he somehow deprived other anglers from catching more smallmouth like that as he removed the fish from the population. However, this is simply not true.
“Fishing regulations are in place to allow for harvest to take place within certain boundaries, such as size, season, number,” Goode said. “If there was some concern over the harvest of exceptionally large bass in individual waters—that such a thing would negatively affect the overall health of a population or the quality of the fishing opportunities they provide—then biologists would set rules to protect the largest individuals in the population.”
Goode believes that all the negative comments that Oestringer has received from other anglers have nothing to do with the morality of keeping and eating a large smallmouth but more because bass are held in such high esteem by the angling public.
“Bass fishing in general has naturally moved to a heavy catch-and-release ethic over many decades,” Goode said. “We know from our angler surveys that harvest rates of bass are already low. Many anglers just tend not to want to keep bass. But harvest does not harm a population at these low levels, even when a large fish is kept now and then. I often hear people say that those big fish are ‘the breeders’ in the population, and removing the biggest individuals hurts the population by reducing reproductive potential and spawning. That’s not true.”
Goode continued: “Reproductive potential and fecundity (the number of eggs a bass produces in any given spawning year) decline with age. Very old bass produce fewer eggs than younger fish, and the eggs they do produce are often lower quality with lower hatching success. The reality is that this big bass was probably 15-18 years old and past its prime.”
While this may mean that removing the smallmouth from the pond may have helped the overall fish population by removing a large, non-egg-producing predator from the waterway, it brings little consolation to Andrew.
“I kind of wish I had never caught it,” Oestringer told MeatEater. “Or at least that it hadn’t died, and I certainly could do without all the hateful comments from fellow anglers thinking I killed the fish to chase a record. I didn’t think of the record, I never did, but I acted like a responsible angler. My arm was killing me from holding it in the net and paddling with one hand, trying to keep it alive. I’ve fished for smallmouth my whole life and I’ve never seen a fish like that, and it saddens me that it won’t be out there for somebody to catch again.”
Oestringer’s smallmouth will not be listed as an official Vermont State Record, as it was weighed on a non-certified scale. Despite these circumstances, Andrew is quite happy with the situation.
“It’s not a state record because I didn’t follow the proper procedure, and I kind of like it that way,” Oestringer said. “I still get to honor the person who holds the actual record, and I get to remember how happy I was catching that bass. I didn’t think of a record, I was just thinking about what big fish it was and how much I enjoy fishing for smallmouth in that place.”
Oestringer said the pond was particularly special to him because he fished it with a good friend, Mark Hamilton, who passed from cancer a few years ago.
“Every time I catch a smallmouth, I think of him,” Oestringer said. “I wished he was on the water with me that day, but come to think of it, he probably was, and that’s what matters. So, in the end, I’m really glad the original record still stands.”
Read the full article here