Seals and Salmon

proonur

proonur

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Hey everyone, I know this isn't exactly about hunting with a rifle but I sure would have liked to have had one handy last Thursday when I was on vacation on Vancouver Island doing a little salmon fishing.
It seemed like there were about 3 o 4 seals following the boat I was on the whole day long! They not only scared away most of the fish in the area, one even bit a Ling Cod in half that my father in law was reeling in! We really couldn't shake the little bounders off no matter where we went to fish.
The only thing I could legally do was use the slingshot that was on the boat to fire warning shots at them to keep them away. They were really smart and stayed out about 60 yards from the boat which was just far enough away that my sling shotted marbles would land about 10 feet in front of them, no matter how hard I pulled back on it.
Came away with a couple of rock fish, and the head of a ling cod at the end of the day... along with a sudden feeling of support for the seal hunt everyone is bashing!
:D
 
Sadly, you could get into deep doo-doo if you shot one! It wasn't always that way. It used to be that every commercial fish boat carried a rifle handy, usually a 30-30 and shot every seal they could.
One of the first biologist stationed in Prince George hunted them at the mouth of the Skeena River, with the then nearly new, 222.
 
The seals at this time of year are not just a pest, we've lost parts of fish while fighting them on the line.

The real damage is in the spring when they eat 100's if not more smolts n their way out to the ocean.

IMHO there should be a cull, there's no shortage. Once saw a log boom in tow, so many seals the wood was hard to see.
 
All the fishing boats around the Western Cape have one guy whose job it is to shoot seals. They are not allowed to, but nobody catches them on the open sea.

A while back an old fisherman came into a gunshop with a pretty rusted up Rossi 12ga single barrel. He bought a recoil pad for the butt and complained that his shoulder was hurting real bad, since he shot about 18 seals that day!
 
DirtyOldSix said:
All the fishing boats around the Western Cape have one guy whose job it is to shoot seals. They are not allowed to, but nobody catches them on the open sea.

Yes, I also know this, but I thought I might be a naughty boy if I said so on these threads!
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Amphibious,

It can be very aggravating when you loose a fish to a human conditioned oportunistic seal. Sometimes if its slow out here where I live, a guy will spend all day fishing for salmon and only get that one chance a day. Happened to me recently, I was just about to net a nice 25 lb spring and a seal jetted out from under the boat and grabbed the fish, not more than 5 ft off the back of the boat, sounded straight down to the bottom, then to shore and ate it after wrapping my line around the bull kelp. It was a piss off, as I learned it was at least the 3rd fish that after noon that one seal took. :):sniper:
 
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Amphibious said:
so some seals took your fish, and you wanted to shoot them? grow up.

how many embolized rockfish did you throw back?
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If a mouse crawls out of your basement and into your pantry to eat your favourite cookies that you earned through your own work, wouldn't you set a trap for him?
I suppose some people would say that mouse is just doing what comes naturally to it and you can't blame him for that. I agree wholeheartedly with that, and that's why I would like to do what comes "naturally" to me as well and shoot it or scare it off some other way.
To me, these seals are acting very much like bears do that hang around human garbage bins or tents, choosing to eat there instead of going to forage and hunt what they normally do. Those bears either get relocated, or sometimes destroyed if they're a real problem. Before you say there's a difference, understand that there isn't a seal anywhere that could catch a healthy salmon or cod on it's own. They know that once the fish are hooked they CAN catch them though, and now they figure it's something they're entitled to. I think that as long as the seal numbers aren't too low I should be able to shoot them if they are really being a pest, but that's just my opinion and you're certainly entitled to yours.

Btw... the "embolized rock fish" comment confused me. Fileting fish is hardly a a non-surgical, minimally-invasive procedure performed by an interventional radiologist and interventional neuroradiologist involving the selective occlusion of blood vessels... to my knowledge anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embolization
 
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bam bam said:
Amphibious,

It can be very aggravating when you loose a fish to a human conditioned oportunistic seal. Sometimes if its slow out here where I live, a guy will spend all day fishing for salmon and only get that one chance a day. Happened to me recently, I was just about to net a nice 25 lb spring and a seal jetted out from under the boat and grabbed the fish, not more than 5 ft off the back of the boat, sounded straight down to the bottom, then to shore and ate it after wrapping my line around the bull kelp. It was a piss off, as I learned it was at least the 3rd fish that after noon that one seal took. :):sniper:
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I grew up spearfishing with sharks, didn't shoot them when they took my fish. just doing what oportunistic predators do. just like seals...
 
proonur said:
If a mouse crawls out of your basement and into your pantry to eat your favourite cookies that you earned through your own work, wouldn't you set a trap for him?
I suppose some people would say that mouse is just doing what comes naturally to it and you can't blame him for that. I agree wholeheartedly with that, and that's why I would like to do what comes "naturally" to me as well and shoot it or scare it off some other way.
]
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The difference is that seals are cute and mice are not. Seals are not much different than crows or rats.

:)
 
1) where on the island did you go fishing ..i hear there catchin lots out of sooke
2) seal are rats just bigger and i think there should be a harvest of them to help the fishery and may as well make some leather jackets
 
There should be a traditional native fishery for seals. That would take the pressure off depleted salmon stocks in two ways and let the indginest peoples practise tradition means.
 
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