We promote catch and release. Yet, I admit, I will occasionally eat fish when I’m out. Killing fish, and eating them seem to be a part of the human instinct. I’m a big believer that generally “a fish is too valuable to be caught only once”. But, I also try to avoid being a hypocrite. I eat meat, and I eat fish too, and there is no reason I should be able to do it only if bought from a market where the act of killing and the connection that brings to the food you’re about to eat are outsourced to the fishmonger. But, in order to reconcile my love for sport fishing, and my desire to eat the occasional fish, over the years I have come up with a rule of thumb for the occasions I’ll allow myself to take a fish’s life and eat it: stocked fish or places that I’m fairly certain see less than one angler a week, or where there is a clearly huge abundance of small (8-9″ fish).I never feel very pleased when killing a fish. It’s not a good feeling. I still feel a need to say “thank you” every time I do take a fish’s life. However, I have realized that every time I do keep a fish I feel that I look at them at a different way, as a source of sustenance and I greatly respect them for it. The fish is no longer a “toy” to play with, but a life, a being. But, well, enough of that, I can get very philosophical about it.To humanely kill a fish we want it to be done quickly, so the fish is not suffering. Typically if I intend to keep a fish for dinner I will wait to keep the fish I catch near the end of the day. And, then I kill the fish immediately after catching them. I really do not like the idea of keeping them alive in the water through a stringer or other medium to keep them “fresher” – they will be plenty fresh still. The best way I have found to kill a fish so far is to insert a sharp knife through the back of the head/”neck” to sever the spine. This tends to be the quickest way in my experience. To carry a fish back to camp, I use whatever grasses or small branches I find nearby (pic below). I insert the grasses or small branch through the mouth and gill. If I’m fishing back to camp, I’ll put it in the water, in a secure small pool, just to keep the fish fresh. Otherwise, I cover it with large leaves.At camp, I will cook them over a fire, normally by skewering it. I cook it “shioyaki” style, which is only sea-salt on the skin of the fish (shio means salt,yaki is grilled). This is a way I learned to appreciate the fish for its own flavor on my first visit to Japan, when, while visiting the town of Nikko (close to some spectacular waterfalls), I saw a street food vendor carrying a cart with a fire ring and several fish on skewers around this fire, like candied apples. They had only sea-salt on the skin, were about 8-9″ long and were the most delicious fish ever. In Japan they say the fish in that 8-9″ range are “shioyaki size”, and I find that to be the perfect size and about the only size I will keep. I release the bigger fish to procreate, and the smaller ones to live longer and provide more sport. I show a little bit of that in this video.