At Wednesday’s tourism award ceremony – Mike Heusner, Craig Hayes, and Ali Flota received the environmental award for, according to the official release from the tourism board, “getting the catch & release legislation passed for the protection of bonefish, permit, and tarpon in Belize.” Sounds good, but the only thing is that there is no such legislation! That’s right, it’s an apparently widely propagated falsehood that Belize has passed catch and release legislation – when it has not.

That was confirmed to us today by Beverly Wade, the Director of the Fisheries Department. There is a draft that Heusner, Craig and Hayes worked on for a dozen years, but that’s all it is, draft legislation. It was considered last year, but best information suggests that executive expediency trumped thorough thinking, and the legislation was scrapped. So the only thing to celebrate is 12 years of hard work that’s produced a draft.

Award recipient Mike Heusner from Belize River Lodge told us that’s while he is honoured – passing the legislation is more important.

Mike Heusner, Award Recipient
“Well we’ve been practicing catch and release for many years. In practice we do it, especially the fly fishing community and many of the other sport fishing areas practice catch and release and that is not only in Belize, it is worldwide. Because the fact that the legislation has not been passed is not critical at this time.

We in the industry not having the legislation passed, we are not impatient about it. If you are going to be a Belizean you have to learn patience. You’ve got to maintain patience and I think it is important that it be passed so that the legal protection is there for those species in the future. Things change, people change, some people might come along and decide we don’t want to protect these species, we want to kill them off – hang them up like they used to do and take pictures and brag about the dead fish pictures and the legislation will prevent having just dead fish kept and proper catch and release so that the species survive after being caught. It is also a practice that we have to spread around with the sports fishing community. Most guys know how to release these fish properly so they don’t die after being caught.”

And while at best the BTB has now played a part in perpetuating a widely held misconception – which we hope isn’t some perverse marketing strategy – the official comeback from the director’s office was that the catch and release legislation will be tabled at the next sitting of the House. We’ll wait and see on that one.