Respecting the Fight: A Fisherman’s Approach to Releasing Big Catches

It’s a big one. All right. Put the heck of a fight, man. She nailed that lure. She’s beautiful. A big old belly on her. All right, say goodbye, so what I like to do, um, and some of y’all know what I’m talking about, is when they put up a fight like that, and they’re big that way, a lot of lactic acid that builds up in the fish and, you know, they’re in shock cause they’re out of the water. So instead of throwing them back in, um. Which they survive when you throw them back in, of course. But what I do like to do is I’ll get in the water and place them back in, gently move them back and forth so the oxygen from the water can really get inside their lungs and help the transfer. Kind of help them transfer back into the water. So just a little thing I do, I saw. I think I saw somebody do that on TV years ago. I think Bill Dance did that. I saw him get the water and, um, put a big old bass back that way to make sure that, uh, she got proper oxygen in her lungs. So thank you, Bill.