August 26th-28th report

I had some great guys out the last few days but the fish didn't seem to be active when we were on the water. We did manage three fish but should have caught quite a few more with as good as they are. Lonardi caught one that we didn't get a chance to measure because it flipped off the bump board and into the lake. It was a low thirty inch fish. Rachel caught a 44 incher and I caught a 45 incher. The one Rachel caught had been caught before and had a gill torn and had a bad lesion near it's tail. We didn't see the sore until we picked it up for pictures. It almost bled to death right there. Took us more than an hour to get the fish back going again. I don't know if it was some kind of cancer or a mishandling incident.

We did see a few good ones in the last few days and caught the two nice ones but I think our time on the water was off. Probably should have fished later and earlier. Hard to do sometimes.

Water temps were between 67 and 72 the last few days.

ty (or anybody else that wants to chime in)

i have worked 20-30 minutes on a fish nursing it back, never an hour. i hold and support it upright and make slight side to side movements while holding the base of its tail, into the wind. i cut hooks-leave the fish in the bag until the camera/bumpboard is ready and never try to keep a fish out of the water (especially on warmer days) for more than 1-2 minutes for pictures and measuring..

do you have any tricks some of us should know when nursing it back to health? an hour+ seems unreal, and when do you (if ever) give up? i've heard of people trying to get a fish to "belch"-maybe to remove air-but am not sure what they are really talking about.

thanks for the input

As far as the "Belching", I have not read any research on the topic, but I will make an educated guess. As I mentioned to Ty once, fish can fill their swim bladders in two ways. They either have specialized cells in the lining of the swim bladder that takes oxygen from the blood stream or they have an opening that connects the GI tract to the swim bladder and fill it by "gulping" air. Musky and Pike have the latter type. It is possible that when we take fish out of the water, they unintentionally overfill their swim bladder. This may be disorienting to the fish. I have never had to "burp" a musky, but have seen it be useful on other species I have sampled.

Isn't it phystostomic or phystostatic where one fills their air bladder with air by gulping and one fills their bladder through oxygen in red blood cells? I know I spelled those wrong. I slept through that class.

As for nurturing back to health, I usually do the slow side to side method more than forward and backward motions. Very slow side to side. I think more than anything it just gets their bearings back in place and lets their gills get going strong. If that fails, like it did the other day, I put them in the livewell and run water through their gills for them. Although illegal to do, it works. I don't think a DNR agent would mind if you were trying to revive the fish.

Physostomous = Air from GI tract
Physoclistous = Air from blood stream

Oh man, I was way off! Thanks Paul.