Franktroutangler recently posted on the PA Hunting Forum “... on a lifetime basis I have now caught 279,247 trout on spinners since 1979 when I began spin fishing.” He claims he has caught an average of 13.3 trout per hour over the past 22 years.
He also says he only uses barbed treble hooks on his spinners to minimize the number of hooked fish that get away, and he measures and records every trout in his log. Pictures that he has posted online show that he is not adverse to holding trout out of the water, or sliding them onto rocks, in order to take nicely posed photos.
IF one is to believe his reported catch statistics, then one must question how many of these 279,000+ trout have not lived after being caught, handled, and released. Or at a minimum, how many of those trout were forever scarred from the removal of those barbed treble hooks.
Pick a number. 5%? 10%? Whatever number it is, this man has probably killed and/or disfigured more PA trout than almost any other angler has even thought about catching in their entire lifetime.