Were the Good Old Days Really Better?

Ah, the good ol’ days. Back then unfished bass populations had more and larger fish. Only natural mortality, primarily predation, reduced their abundance, so bass surviving their first couple of years generally died of old age.

Though we don’t have creel reports or tournament results for verification, I have little doubt that the few anglers who fished for bass 80 to 100 years ago enjoyed incredible fishing. Of course they rowed or sculled small wooden boats and fished with bamboo or steel rods.

But what about bass fishing at the beginning of what I’ll call the post-modern bass fishing era—when we began using more comfortable fishing craft equipped with trolling motors and depthfinders and tackle still in use today? Is bass fishing today as good as it was 30 or 40 years ago?

That’s a good topic for friendly debate by a campfire or over a round of cold beverages. But to fishery managers, the question is significant because they’re in the business of making fishing as good as it can be while conserving the fishery resources for which they are the designated stewards. Given this noble charge, fishery managers rely on data, not opinion. Okay, call in the researcher.

The Hypothesis

The researcher begins by presenting a hypothesis, a statement that can be tested: Bass fishing quality today is about the same as in the past. Next, we need measurable variables to test this hypothesis. Catch rates and average size of bass are appropriate choices. The hypothesis then becomes, “The catch rate and average size of bass caught today are about the same as the catch rate and average size of bass caught 35 years ago.”

The next step is to collect data. Because catch rates vary over time and among lakes, the researcher will want to include a large number of angler trips and a large number of lakes. Although fishery management agencies have been conducting creel surveys for many years, retrieving pre-computer data is a challenge to say the least. Fortunately, Bass Angler Sportsman Society (BASS/ESPN) tournament records back to 1972 are available on their website.

The Data

Results were obtained for 267 tournaments on 78 waters from 1972 to 2006. Calculating average size of bass is easy—total weight divided by number of fish weighed in. Calculating catch rate is not as simple, because the number of anglers and tournament formats varied over time. To allow comparison, I standardized catches by dividing fish weighed in by the number of angler days, to obtain catch rate expressed as fish per angler day. BASS tournaments were of two types—3-day events with 250 or more contestants and 4-day events with fewer, and presumably higher-caliber, competitors. I analyzed 3- and 4-day events separately.

Tournament limits declined from 10 bass in early events to 5-fish limits after 1994. It’s impossible to accurately adjust for different limits, so I separately compared catch rates and average size for tournaments with 5-, 7-, and 10-fish limits.

Since we’re interested in a comparison over time, I used average catch rate and average fish weight for each year in looking for trends. For those with a statistical bent, this resulted in equal weighting of tournaments in each year.