BLOG: Should slot limits be introduced?

Welcome back to another new year of new beginnings and new possibilities!

I hope all of you had the chance to indulge in a serious amount of fishing during your holidays. Judging by the amount of boat traffic on my local waterways I’d hazard to guess most of you made the most of your time off. The local fish population got a good working over!

I guess the tone of this week’s blog is a little controversial. I don’t want to kick off proceedings this year with negative talk but rather allow ourselves a chance to dream of the "what ifs".

I spent a good deal of time in the past few weeks in Lake Macquarie on the NSW Central Coast. It is the largest lake in the southern hemisphere and a well managed fishery to boot. Commercial harvesting has been restricted for over 5 years now and the lake was selected to trial the now-popular artificial reefs balls paid for by our fishing licences.

I call this place the "land of the giants". If you want to connect to a mother-lover of all flathead, this is the place. It seems this species in particular have benefited greatly from the zero commercial harvest and now get greater opportunity to grow to big proportions. In one session we knocked over a stack of fish in the 70 – 85cm range flicking 2” Gulp! Shrimps for bream on 1/16oz Nitro jigheads with a measly no.4 hook. Imagine how you'd go with a more targeted approach specifically chasing these fish?

So my questions to you are this. Would a slot limit, as imposed in QLD (only fish between 40-70cms are eligible for recreational harvest), have the same impact on growth rates and biomass compared to a fishery without commercial harvesting but with current NSW bag and size limits?

It’s an interesting debate. On one hand, in QLD, we have the rec sector carrying the burden and in NSW the commercial guys miss out, to the benefit of the recs. Either way however, the fish in both scenarios benefit greatly. I often hear great stories of monster lizards being pulled out of famous places like "the pin" near South Stradbroke. On the flipside the good stories locally are coming from the estuaries that have ejected the dreaded nets.

I reckon if I’m gonna get my landmark croc of over 1m it’s gonna come from Lake Mac. The sad thing is current legislation would allow me to keep it. And that my friends, makes me sad!

Should NSW follow QLD’s lead and impose slot limits for flathead?