The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Liberate the fish! The cry went up from far and wide, here to Michigan. The fishermen are up in arms! Well, the fishermen are up in reels. Damn the pandemic, they want to fish. They bought an expensive boat, they’ve got gas going bad, they have gear and motors and licenses, by god, they want to fish. Somewhere in the Constitution there’s an amendment they have the right to catch fish. Somewhere next to the one that gives them the right to have gun shops open. When fishing is outlawed, only outlaws will fish. Or fish will be outlaws. Something like that….

I confess here and now, I have fished all my life. My sailboat has a downrigger on it for salmon fishing. You know, when there were salmon. I have licenses to dig clams and catch crab. And I can see their point. We don’t have clambakes with one hundred other clammers and we don’t tether our boats together to fish. It’s a lonely occupation, fishing. At least it was for me. Nobody in the boat with me, pretty much no fish either. But it was like the old joke where a guy comes across a fisherman casting from the pier and asks, How’s the fishing? And the fisherman sez Great. How many you caught? the guy asks the fisherman. None, the fisherman sez, but the fishing is great.

The parks are closed, the boat ramps are closed off, the quarantine is in effect. We’re supposed to stay home. It’s no surprise to me that the first signs of insurrection, the first hint of revolution, aren’t the poor, the unemployed, the homeless … no, the protests started with the sports fishermen. They fight with the tribes, they fight with the government, they’d fight with anybody who took away their god-given right to fish the lakes and the streams and the Puget Sound. Where else can they go to get away from their wives, to drink beer in peace all day long, to breathe free the backwash of gas motors?

Personally, I hope the government, when they begin opening up the closures for schools and businesses, parks and trails, bars and restaurants in staged progressions, they let these fisherman fish first. For no better reason than to shut them up.

Hits: 38