Turns out I'm not actually "alone" on this one, though I'm not in the majority either. My wife will tell you it's because I have no friends, but that's not completely correct - I can think of at least 3 that I have :)
Personal faults aside, this actually does relate to a neat little piece of research. Catch rates relative to angler party size with implications for monitoring angler success from L.E. Miranda at Mississippi State Univ. Turns out that whether you look at bluegill, crappie or bass anglers, the same basic trends and statistics apply with not much variability between the groups. So while about 34% of all anglers make solo fishing trips, about 54% go with a partner of some sort. Percentages drop off rather steeply after that as party size increases to 3 per trip or more.
So in defense of us solo anglers, literature suggests that anglers "who fished alone fished more frequently, placed greater emphasis on physico-biological attributes related to fishing skills, and assigned the least importance to attributes associated with keeping fish to eat." Miranda's study concluded similarly that solo anglers are more likely to practice "catch and release" of all species when compared to multi-party angling. Research by Choi et al. (1994) has also suggested that solo anglers may demonstrate an 'above average commitment' to angling in general, as well as a higher set of skill level. Sounds good to me :)
Back on Miranda's research, some other interesting findings;
- Angling parties of 2 had the longest average fishing trips (mean number of hours fished) when compared to 1 person or 3+ person parties.
- Single anglers had the highest catch rate among all groups when calculated as fish per hour based on man-hours.
- But when taking total catch into consideration and adjusted to equivalent fishing effort (hrs), two person trips caught more fish than single anglers, and 3 person efforts landed more than both 1 or 2-party efforts. Catch numbers went down though as trip size increased to 4 or more anglers fishing in a group.
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