Cow nose ray tournament

[dasher]

law of the jungle : eat what you kill

& they can be very good to eat if an effort is put into preparing them.

Fillet & chunk into 2" squares & rinse until all smell of ammonia is gone & meat is white, may take several hours to get all blood out, parboil for 2 mintues & then cutinto bit sized pieces, roll in mix of 2/3 flour & 1/3 oldbay & fry they can be very very good. nuturalists at pt lookout served them for years that way.

[bignose]

From the video I saw on WBAL (which was edited), there wasn't anything "Sportsmanlike" about this tournament. It was literally "shooting fish in a barrel" and the treatment of the catch was quite brutal and barbaric. Clubbing and asphyxiating catch, even of a "nuisance" species is hardly sport, and as mentioned above, shows fishing in a negative light. It was plain and simple eradication.

There was video of the "contestants" dumping their offal and dead catch back into the river. Just another source of pollution.
As for crab bait, there was a test conducted by the Virginia Marine Institute and rays proved to be unusable as crab bait (and you thought that crabs eat everything!).

I made the analogy on Tidalfish that this was comparable to hunting a herd of deer, another nuisance species without any natural predators, with an assault weapon, and leaving the carcasses in the field to rot.

A couple of years ago, I had a client hook a ray while chumming with light spinning tackle up near Hacket's. He was pretty well lubricated (we allow alcohol on the boat). Normally we get them close to the boat and then cut the line.
He insisted on having me bring the ray onboard.
I tried to explain to him that we do not land rays, since the only way to get them into the boat was to gaff them, and I wasn't going to gaff and kill something that we weren't going to eat. (Besides, I didn't want to deal with a stingray flopping on the deck with 6 customers on board, let alone having to clean the blood and shmutz off of the deck.
He got pretty irate, so I brought the ray along side, and scraped the leader vigorously hard against the edge of the wooden hulled boat several times, and then pulled up sharply on the leader.
"Snap!"
"Oh, geez, the line broke!"
He didn't leave me a tip.