Out of curiosity when is a fish too coloured to keep? I usually try to stick to silver fish when beach fishing but have seen others keep fish with some colour to them.
Is there point at which coloured fish are okay to keep? Is it different for different species?
Thanks.

really for me its silver fish I'm after but i've kept a few golden springs and I didn't notice anything wrong with the meat.

i think it depends on what you have access to, I'm on the ocean all summer so I have lots of chances to eat bright clean fish. If I didn't spend time on the ocean and lived near a stream I might be taking darker fish.

Then again some people just bonk fish because they can.

Yeah
For the most part i just keep the silver fish, anything thats hit the river i leave alone!

All salmon quit eating prior to spawning. Once that happens they start living off the nutrients they have stored and the meat begins to deteriorate and it will start to get soft. Once in fresh water, the meat starts to get “mushy”. The longer without eating and in fresh water, the mushier it gets. Personally, if it isn’t very bright, I don’t eat it and my wife won’t touch it. A lot of people “smoke” these fish, but I have found smoking fresh bright a lot better. I don’t even bother keeping them anymore, but can you eat it, yes?

BTW… the other thing that might cause soft flesh in fresh ocean caught salmon is a disease called “Kudoa thyrsites”, that is a disease that can be passed. Marine Harvest Canada has reported their fish have been infected with this disease for quite some time?

“ According to IntraFish, an industry newspaper, the kudoa parasite affects 20-50 percent of all salmon produced in British Columbia, costing the industry there at least $30 to $40 million annually. Atlantic salmon, the predominant commercial stock for farming operations, are more vulnerable to the kudoa parasite than Pacific salmon.” Ref: http://www.puresalmon.org/diseases_parasites.html

“ Quality issues related to soft flesh caused discards and complaints amounting to NOK 26 million in 2008. Mortality from a major algae bloom and a sea lion attack resulted in exceptional costs in the amount of NOK 9 million for the year. Actions to strengthen the operational performance were taken towards the end of the year. Operational EBIT for 2008 was NOK 108 million compared to NOK 222 million in 2007”
Ref: http://hugin.info/209/R/1310360/303078.pdf

“The average mortality rate was 0.22% per month in the quarter, which is 0.18 percentage points lower than in the same period last year. With the exception of Kudoa presence, the biological situation remains satisfactory. Slow sea water growth has been recorded in some sites in the spring and summer of 2009.”
Ref: http://hugin.info/209/R/1334763/317024.pdf

A few years ago, I caught and kept a couple of quite dark chinooks from the salt water, just off the Little Qualicum River mouth. I typically just gut and clean my fish with-out scaling them prior to freezing. When I get ready to process the fish, and after they are fairly well thawed, I scale them with a garden hose, and then process them either by canning or smoking.
When these dark fish were thawing, they developed a thick coat of mucus type slime all over their bodies, and I wondered about my wisdom in keeping them in the first place. I decided to carry on, and when I got to the point of scaling them, I found that they had very few scales, but washed up cleanly, so I carried on, and they turned out to be just fine. firm and tasty.
I asked around, to see if any-one else had experienced this, but no one that I talked to had, so I contacted a Fisheries biologist in Nanaimo to see what he knew.
He had never heard of this, no scales issue, but said that once the salmon get into fresh water, they stop eating, as Charlie said, and it has been said, that they can start to absorb their scales to maintain nutrician. Healso said that they frequently enter the fresh water, but I guess they decide that they were premature, and retreat back to the salt water. This can happen several times, until they finally stay in the fresh water. That would account for them being in the salt water when I caught them. I would think that I would have noticed, at the time that I cleaned these fish that they didn`t have many scales. He He could not shed any light on why the heavy slime build up. Could it have had something to do with the Freezing?
Lure-washer

I've never heard of it, but it could have something to do with the lack of scales, maybe a reaction to help retain some protection?

Silver is where its at leave the coloreds to do their thing....