Welfare Fishing
Welfare Fishing
I've been fishing hard for the past 40 plus years and about
thirty years ago I started to enjoy catching fish and tossing
them back. I usually bring along a camera and have collected so
many photos of me or friends with fish caught (and usually
released) that they now fill two large fish albums. My niece,
Shana, recently complained, saying, "How come I'm not in the
fish book?" I explained that in order to get in the fish book,
you had to catch a fish and have someone take the picture. As a
kid I used to fish on the piers of southern California and in
those days everyone had a five-gallon bucket and into that
bucket went every single fish they caught. You could walk down
the pier, looking in peoples' buckets, seeing how the fishing
was going. It was a point of pride to have a bucket full of
fish--what kind of fish, tomcods, perch, mackerel, croaker,
bonito, didn't really matter. What mattered was having a
bucketful of fish. Most of the many fish I tossed in my bucket
ended up getting buried in our back yard. Good fertilizer for
the plants was the way we excused it. Not that in those days we
needed any sort of excuse for keeping every single fish we
caught. It was the way it was done then. On the ocean piers
today I see much the same thing. Catch and release appears to be
a very foreign idea. Last time I was on the pier I was casting a
line of little jigs, catching and then tossing back lots of big
sardines. The people on both sides of me asked me to give the
fish to them, but I said no, I was into catching and releasing.
They looked at me with a certain bit of hostility and as though
I had to be completely out of my mind. One thing about me that
is quickly apparent is that I'm pretty big. At 6'2" tall and 230
pounds I don't look like someone to mess with, and I'm not. This
gives me somewhat of an advantage with irate fisherfolk. Two
weeks ago I was in Minnesota visiting my brother in St. Paul.
One afternoon I decided to drive down to nearby Long Lake to try
my hand at tossing bread balls to the carp. There's a little
pier on that lake and I walked out on it and started to drown
the white bread. I had the whole pier to myself and it was quite
nice, even if the carp weren't cooperating. Pretty soon a man
who brought an ice chest, a paperback copy of Clan of the Cave
Bear, several rods, a big tackle box, and a large portable radio
joined me. He tuned his radio to some classical music station
and turned it up loud. Now I like violins as much as the next
guy, but not especially when I'm carp fishing. But it was a
public pier and I'm a polite guy so I didn't complain. This new
fellow was quite the talker. In no time he'd told me half his
life story. He worked for the city, had read Clan of the Cave
Bear five times, and was a (self proclaimed) expert on all
matter anthropological. He also complained bitterly about the
hoards of damn foreigners who had moved to Minnesota and who
caught all the fish while they lived high on the hog on public
welfare. I tired to ignore him as best I could but it wasn't
easy. Once in awhile I'd try to get my own two cents in about
something or other but he never let me finish a sentence and I
quickly gave up trying. He was fishing with what looked like
fifty-pound line, a huge bobber, a heavy sinker, a size 1 hook
and a dead leach. He claimed there were huge bluegills in the
lake but he wasn't catching any of them. I decided to give him
a little competition. I was using six-pound line on an ultra
light outfit. I rigged up with a long shanked number 8 gold
hook, put a very small bobber some four feet up from my hook,
baited it with a worm from my brother's perennial garden and
started to fish for bluegills. On the first cast I quickly got
into a really beautiful bluegill, big, fat, solid, a male with a
bright orange chest. I pulled him up, admired him for a moment
and then dropped him back into the murky waters of Long Lake.
"What the hell did you do that for?" said my classical loving
buddy. "That was a damn good fish." "I'm into catch and
release," I said. "I just like to fish and catch fish. I almost
never keep any." "Well, give them to me then," he said. Now to
be honest, if I'd have liked the guy better, a whole lot better,
I probably would have. But his welfare talk and ramblings about
how the minorities had screwed up the world was bugging
me...that and his big mouth and loud classical music. "Sorry," I
said, "I catch 'em and I toss 'em. You'll just have to catch
your own." And then I started to fish bluegills with a
vengeance. I started catching bluegills almost as fast as I
could toss in my line and almost every one of them was huge. It
had been years since I'd caught such big sunnies. Every time I
tossed one back I could hear this guy groaning but I just
ignored him. After I'd caught a dozen or so of these slab
sunfish another fellow joined us on the end of the pier. He took
a spot at the rail, between me and the other guy. He hadn't come
to fish, just to socialize I guess. I quickly found out he was a
retired optometrist, and that he too felt oppressed by all the
gays, lesbians, blacks, Asians, Mexicans, politicians, you name
it. I hung into my biggest bluegill yet. On my light tackle the
little bruiser put up a darn good fight. I landed my fish,
admired it briefly and tossed it back into the lake. "My God!"
swore the old optometrist. "That was really nice sunfish. Why
did you throw it back?" "I'm into catch and release, " I said.
"Yeah?" said the old geezer. "Yep," said the city employee.
"He's into catching them and throwing them back. Nice fish like
that, you'd think he'd give some to someone else. But oh no, he
throws them all back." "You know," I said, talking to the
retired optometrist and pretending the other guy wasn't even
there, " People sometimes get me confused. They think I'm the
welfare department, that I'm out here to pass out free fish to
people. But I ain't the welfare department. And anyhow, all the
fish I caught I put right back in the lake where anyone else can
catch them themselves if they want to. Funny how some people are
always looking for a handout, isn't it." The old fellow just
looked at me for a moment. "That's cold," he said. And I guess
it was. But you know what? I enjoyed it. I caught a few more of
the jumbo bluegills, tossed them back, and then left the pier.
The fishing had been pretty decent but the ambiance sucked. It
was time to find a different lake to fish.