Please do your part to help stop the archaic practice of guides gifting fish.  Gifting is hurting Wisconsin's walleye fisheries and needs to stop. Thankfully this loophole in the law is being exposed, albeit slowly. 

If your hire a guide do not accept his offer of gifted fish. Support and promote educational efforts that inform guides (and clients) about how this is hurting walleye populations. Finally, support the proposed changes in the law that will eliminate gifting.

This change isn't meant to impinge on a guides business, it's just simply to stop this one aspect of guiding that hurts every other fisherman.  

I don't doubt that it's that way now but it apparently wasn't in the late-80's and early-90's. I bought my own boat shortly after graduating from college in '94 so I haven't been on a LM charter since then.

That I've never heard of, sometimes an extra fish or two while your pulling.

On Lake Michigan for Trout/Salmon you also must have a Sport Trolling license and must fill out a sport trolling report for every trip you run. It asked lots of questions like how many customers, how many lines fished, time of day, what quadrant of the lake, and how many fish by species. It must be filled out right after your trip and each month the reports must be sent to Sturgeon Bay to be logged.

If a captain and mate were consistently "catching" their limits they would have questions to answer from the state. 

I've hired a handful of guides over the years. Besides one exception, I can't honestly remember one guide who gifted me his fish. They may have kept one or two for themselves for a fresh meal of fish, but never their limit for me or anyone else in the boat. The exception was Lake Michigan. I do recall the captain and first mate both gifting their limits to clients. Seeing as how that is primarily a put-and-take fishery, I don't have a problem with that.

I never supported the practice of the "guide limit" being available to a client or the guide group bagging to fill a client's limit.  Guides should be educators, not freezer fillers!

I had a guide once reach into his cooler in his truck where he had extra fillets and said "here, now at least you can go home with your limit!"  I didn't ask, but I thought that was really nice of him that he had some extra frozen fish, clearly labeled, to add up to our limit.  Other guides I've been with have also counted part of their fish as our limit, but I've never gone home with more than the daily bag limit, just enough fish to make it a limit.

The customer has the option to not take more than their limit.  Hard to blame the guide if the customers are taking advantage of the fishery.

In my experience, I haven't had a guide gift me any fish.  I keep my bag limit only if I keep any at all.

dnr.wi.gov/contact/

Chat, Call, email

Fishlovme, yeah, it's confusing. I think what they generally mean is that if you have the ability to put the fish in your car, those fish would count as your daily limit (so you can't go over it). So if you were fishing and your car was right behind you, it'd count, but if it was a decent hike, it wouldn't. I am guessing it is going to be case dependent.

Most people are totally unaware of a possession limit. I'd imagine a ton of regulars are over it for species like walleye (possession limit is 10), salmon (10), panfish (50) and trout (10).

On a guided trip the customers can ask the guide his or her preferences on this issue. One guide, when asked, requested that we return the biggest fish so they can spawn again. It was no problem for us. We ended up with three limits of nice eaters and released the biggest smallies and walleye that came to the boat. It was a great day of fishing. Communicate these requests because I'm sure most clients want lots of fish and most guides want future trips to have sustainable fish to catch. The knowledge gained on a guided trip should be worth more than a meal of fish.