Argh! More illegal fishing!
June 25, 2008
Note: this one has a twist.
Rod
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Bass poaching goes unpunished
http://www.recorder.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1086866
also click The Review Mirror to the right of this page for another view of this story.
This a story in the Brockville Recorder and Times I hoped we would not see. On the front page of Monday’s edition the story tells that a father and son of Asian descent on Friday last caught four bass in Westport, showed them off to bystanders, and refused to return them to the water when asked repeatedly to do so by observers. The fish were dead by the time a conservation officer arrived on the scene, but he did not lay charges, despite the flurry of calls to the TIPS line and the Ministry of Natural Resources which brought him there from Kemptville in the first place. Anglers and civic officials in Westport at first were understandably disappointed and frustrated at what appeared to be an unfair action.
Turns out the conservation officer may have been right. The man and his son were very recently arrived in the community from China. The wife and mother of the family (who does have a fishing license) plans to join an existing medical practice in the village as soon as she completes her certification. Why the husband took his son fishing without a license is beyond me, but in the interests of allowing the new family to fit into the community, the accusers unanimously agreed to educate rather than punish.
The Friday Fiasco, as The Review Mirror reporter/photographer Marco Smits dubbed it, stands out as a classic example of how a news story can have an entirely different look as one gains more knowledge of the people and the events.
I do have a suggestion to whoever looks after recent immigrants from China. Fergoodness sakes, if someone is heading for Eastern Ontario in summer, he/she’s going to be drawn irresistably to the area’s fishing holes. Make sure they are warned. They know enough to get driver’s licenses, insurance, learn the traffic laws, so why can’t they learn the rules surrounding a favourite summertime activity? This is a no-brainer, folks.
Before Barbara Hall comes shrieking down upon this admitted example of stereotyping, I’d like to mention another. Death angel mushrooms are deadly. Four hours after a delicious meal, symptoms of food poisoning strike, last about twelve hours, then go away. Within a week most sufferers are dead, though, from multiple organ failure. Virtually all recorded fatalities from death angels in North America are Cambodian immigrants. It wipes out whole families. Why? The deadly fungus is almost identical to the sand mushroom, a very popular treat in Cambodia. The children generally die first, and then the parents. Does it make sense to target Cambodian immigrants when they arrive and warn them about the trap which awaits?
The Fiasco story initially reminded me very much of a similar situation I encountered while crappie fishing at a culvert on Opinicon this spring. This time the perpetrator was a prosperous-looking, bald, middle aged Caucasian in a white Ford Explorer. He sat on the culvert on a 5 gallon pail with fish in it. He caught a lovely crappie and I complimented him on it. Then I noticed the tail of a giant crappie in his pail. Waitaminute! That thing weighs four to five pounds. That one’s a bass.
“That’s a largemouth! You have to let that go!” He just looked at me.
“I’ve been around a long time. I know what I’m doing.” He returned his attention to the water.
The man had obviously decided that law enforcement was not a factor, and he would help himself to what he wanted. None of the other three fishermen at the hole said anything during this encounter. They were obviously aware of the illegal fish, but had chosen to keep quiet. I don’t know if the four fishermen were together, or not. Four vehicles were parked there.
In fury I stalked away, and haven’t written anything about it until now.
I understand how the witnesses to the poaching in Westport must have felt. What bothers me is that they made the effort to report the crime — something I for whatever reason did not do.
Opening Day
June 23, 2008
No date on the calendar holds as much significance to millions of North Americans as the opening of bass season. It’s the day when summer really arrives, holidays begin, and fishing becomes serious — if only the bass would co-operate. They’re notoriously tricky early in the season.
I’ll never forget the time I took my son Charlie with me to fish opening day on Opinicon. He was about nine at the time. We locked Wybmadiity II down through Chaffey’s Lock and anchored just outside the bay below the lock, planning to catch and cook as we went.
We had the dinghy on the transom. Starting at sunrise, we rowed the bay, fishing every promising clump of weeds, casting every overhanging tree and stump, and all without a nibble. As the sun rose high over the familiar water, Charlie was becoming discouraged, and I was running out of excuses for my failure as a guide.
Finally we returned to the mother ship in defeat. As I scraped together an ignominious lunch of peanut butter and bread, Charlie sat down at the stern and dropped his line overboard. The unexpected strike produced a fine dinner fish. We ate it and decided to try the same trick again … and again, until we had caught and released a total of nine largemouth bass from directly under the boat. The sizes ran up to a very respectable five pounds. There’s no accounting for the movements of opening-day bass.
So here are an ex-guide’s tips for success on opening day:
1. This is the start of the real fishing season. Remember how gently you had to handle those crappies and the occasional trout? Forget it. These are largemouths, and if you don’t set that hook HARD, they’ll throw it back at you.
2. Get rid of that six-pound test line. These are real fish, and you don’t want to lose a good one. Check your knot and that of your companion. More bass are lost to loose knots than any other error.
3. Teach everyone in your boat to keep the floor silent, or else get used to fishing from the dock. A scraped tackle box or a dropped lure, and you might as well start the motor and leave the area. The bass just won’t bite until things have settled down. Bare feet work best (unless you accidentally bring a northern pike aboard).
4. The best bass fishing is close to shore, but don’t take the boat in close until you are sure your companions can control their casts, lest you spend the day fishing hooks out of the tops of cedar trees under the baleful gaze of property owners.
5. Use single hooks, if possible. This makes releasing fish much easier, and greatly cuts down on emergency room waits for fish-hook removal. Weedless hooks work very well in bass cover on the Rideau, but again use heavy line. I consider 20 lb. synthetic braided the minimum for fishing bass in heavy cover.
6. Don’t forget: in our district if a bass is shorter than one foot in length, back it goes, without exception. You may keep six per full license, but it’s much cooler to come in with no more than four fish per boat. Practice this: “We kept these four.” Say it again, proudly. Good.
7. For years my fishing pals have agreed not to keep any bass over three pounds. Big bass are too large for kids and women of childbearing age to eat, and they are much more successful at raising their young than smaller fish. By the end of spawning season a 13 inch male is thin and haggard, while a 21 inch largemouth looks as though it has actually put on weight. It deals with nest raiders simply by eating them.
8. Am I catching my share? A study of the fishery in Lake Opinicon, Ont., (Lewis 1965) indicated that for guided parties in July average rates of 0.5-0.3 fish per hour indicated good fishing. (Crossman and Scott, Freshwater Fishes of Canada, p. 739).
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Retired educator and writer Don Warren still delights in telling of that summer when Dr. Lewis hired him to row his guide boat into the sanctuary at the foot of Opinicon Lake and fill a washtub with bass each day for the Queen’s crew to study.
Years later Don taught me how to teach, but he didn’t consider the job finished until I became proficient in the ways of the largemouth bass, the creature which drives the economy of Chaffey’s Locks and surrounding communities. That summer he rented me a canoe each evening, answered my questions and offered advice. By the end of the summer I had the bass pretty well figured out.
Thirty years ago I calculated that, according to Dr. Lewis, two twelve or thirteen inch bass would keep an angler happy for a day of guided fishing. The party would put, on average, about $250 per person into the local economy for that day. Next time you look a bass in the face and decide whether to release it or drop it into the live well, ask yourself: “Is this fish worth $125. to me?”
Filed in Conservation Issues, fish stories
Tags: bass, bass fishing, largemouth bass
Why we built the dinghy
June 1, 2008
I hadn’t expected the fishing bug to hit as late as Labour Day, but Bet and I were anchored in Horseshoe Bay on the Big Rideau when it happened. She said something like, “Think there’d be a bass under that tree over there?” I was hooked.
Problem was that I didn’t have a fishing boat with me, just several unwieldy tons of old wooden cruiser swinging at anchor. My best casts from the bow produced nothing. The fish were under the trees, and I’d just have to go after them.
I set out along the tree-lined shore in an inner tube, towing a second tube for my stringer, with a woolen sock full of frogs attached. My prized heavy-duty bait-casting rod waved aloft and flippers supplied the power. The water seemed a little cool. With growing respect for the rig’s mobility, I worked a dead frog under the overhanging trees. The fish weren’t biting, though. I made my way down the shoreline all the way to the mouth of the bay and up the other side without a strike.
Finally I got to the two massive overhanging hemlocks that had prompted Bet’s comment in the first place. They looked good. The first tree yielded a strike. I set the hook, and in no time a two-pound bass was splashing alongside the tube.
This posed a problem: tree-dwelling bass don’t like sunlight. When hooked, most make a beeline for the largest bit of floating cover in reach. In this case, that object was my inner tube, with me at its centre. While a bass is not regarded as a fierce biter, it does have considerable sticking prowess because of its spiked dorsal fins. With no desire to turn my Speedo into a pin cushion, I had to fend the bass off with flippers until it learned to accept the lesser comfort of the trailing inner tube (which it perforated as soon as the nervous fish floated up into the shade).
Bubbling merrily, my little flotilla continued up the shoreline to the next tree. I was cold, but feeling pretty positive about tubing for bass.
Let me tell you a little about tree fishing: the best trees have water from one to four feet in depth under about a hundred square feet of shaded area. Often the branches come right down to the water, so the sidearm “frogging” cast involves skipping a bait across the surface of the water, through weeds and twigs, and hopefully into the waiting mouth of a large fish under the canopy. This is why such heavy tackle is used: you often have to muscle the bass out of whatever crud he can dig up under the tree.
On this trip I was winning, so I knew I’d find a fish under this tree. The cast was perfect. The dead frog made one skip and landed cleanly in an open spot in the weeds. Nothing. Wait him out. Still nothing. Go home? No. Wait. Still? Just wait.
WHAM! Some strike! Give him a few seconds. SET THE HOOK! HIT HIM TWICE MORE! Still on? Get him out of there!
I put my twin rubber stern drives on full ahead and tried to tow the heavy fish out of his lair. He must have taken a half-hitch around a stump, because he was holding his own pretty well and I was just churning up mud and weeds. I slackened for a second to see if he would ease up too, and then hit him with all of the backbone in the rod. Out he came, foaming the water and gobbling up the distance between us much more quickly than I’d have liked.
It was a large northern pike, an open-mouthed monster who seemed not at all pleased to make my acquaintance. Twice I had to parry the so-and-so’s rushes at my tube by sticking my flipper into his mouth and deflecting him. Then he circled. This startled the bass on the stringer, who forgot his training and again made a sortie toward my Speedo.
I couldn’t break the heavy line, the fish was solidly hooked, and I couldn’t even race from the scene because of the rocks and stumps around the tree. Most of my effort had to go into kicks with flippers to protect my vessel’s hull from the mutinous crew, but eventually we cleared the obstructions and I put the tube up on plane for the quarter-mile run to the mother ship.
As I neared the boat I roared to Bet, who, her mischief of the morning done, had retired to the salon to read a novel. She just shook her head when I handed her up the rod and sculled around to the stern. I swarmed up the swim ladder and back to the bow to take over fighting the fish from the more serene perspective of a captain aboard his ship with no fear of personal hull punctures.
Shortly I landed the respectable five-pound pike, photographed him and let him go. He’d earned it. The bass? Breakfast. The number two tube never recovered. That pike looked a lot bigger from an inner tube.
So that’s why we built the dinghy.
Filed in fish stories
Tags: bait casting, bait fishing, Fishing, Horseshoe Bay, power boating, The Big Rideau, The Rideau, tubing for bass
How to Catch a Splake
April 20, 2008
For a few years I enjoyed the reputation of a successful fisherman. As one of my students commented one day, “Everyone should be good at something, and for you, Mr. C., I guess it’s fishing.”
Personally, I didn’t feel all that competent when it came to splake. Each catch seemed to be the culmination of a series of accidents, and it seemed as though I kept running into fish having an unlucky day.
The whole thing began when Joe Booth, a retired Pennsylvanian at Indian Lake Marina, showed me his new depth finder. Joe’s a legendary northern pike fisherman. He took me out onto Indian Lake and pointed out the huge schools of minnows in the middle. They looked like islands on his screen. “You see those red spots, Rod?” he yelled. “Those are big fish, lying just underneath the schools of minnows! They’re probably splake, but nobody’s ever caught one’a them yet!”
After an abortive attempt to fish bass out of an inner tube the previous Labour Day, that winter I had built a small dinghy in our basement. The launch created a neighbourhood sensation when on a cold March day I had broken a hole in the ice of our pool, popped in the unfinished dinghy and conscripted our neighbour, Ted, to join Charlie and Bet on empty paint cans in the bottom so that I could figure out the proper placement of the seats. As various onlookers watched and joked, I handed the architect a pencil and he drew lines around the cans, thereby giving me the proper seat locations. The rest of the work had gone well and the completed pram was ready to go. (I’m proud to say that a picture of my creation actually appeared in Woodenboat Magazine.)
Bet and I liked to spend hot summer afternoons with a book under the oak tree at Chaffey’s Lock. This entailed frequent trips the length of Indian Lake and across Joe’s schools of fish. I started to pay attention to what passed under Wyb’s keel in this area. Our sonar on the cruiser was one of the old ones with a 60′ dial and a flasher which moved around continuously to indicate a reading. It seemed as though there was a lot going on at 23′, so I resolved to find a way to get a lure down there.
At Bennett’s Bait’n Tackle in Smiths Falls I bought a little plastic toy of a downrigger, added the smallest cannonball Wayne sold, and installed the rig on the transom of the 8½ foot dinghy. I borrowed my son’s flexible crappie rod and attached a silver spoon. When he took out for the Yukon a friend had left us a tiny, air-cooled outboard motor. I bolted it in place as well. When it ran the Eska uttered a devilish roar, but it moved the dinghy at a brisk five miles per hour.
The first time I lowered the ball on the downrigger a splake took my lure and I suddenly found myself in the fight of my life. The cable dangled like an anchor adrift, the motor kept trolling in circles, this frantic monster was tearing line off my reel, and I very much wanted to land it.
Turns out a splake will run without going anywhere. I saw him do it. The fish stopped, lay sulking in the water, and then just rolled, wrapping the line around itself at an incredible rate. Then it reversed the process and tried to get away using the slack. Somehow it didn’t work, and with the help of some cottagers — by this time the dinghy and I had drifted ashore — the second half of the battle played out on Seymour’s lawn. The unlucky fish weighed four pounds, twelve ounces, not bad for my first try. Giddy with success, I hauled my trophy back to the Marina where a festive barbecue ensued. Someone told me I had been gone less than fifteen minutes.
If only I had known… but I was young and stupid at the time. In fact I was so young and stupid that I caught another 34 of the things that summer fishing at 23′, though with no more panicked forays ashore.
That fall Wayne sold me a portable depth finder for the dinghy and I discovered that my magic 23-foot depth was in fact the bottom of the lake at 83′, glimpsed intermittently on a 60′ dial. The spiral of increasing knowledge and decreasing success began with that discovery and continued until in later years the twin curses of wisdom and improved equipment had completely ruined my luck.
In my declining years, though, I can still think back to that first summer as a splake fisherman: through the confident use of wrong information I enjoyed the best fishing of my life. There must be a lesson there somewhere, but in the thirty-five years since I haven’t been able to figure out what.
Flying Carp and the fun of a sensational news story
January 5, 2008
A few years ago I wrote a novel for young adults in which a few mutant fish grew to enormous size and terrorized guides and their clients around Chaffey’s Locks. The villain of the piece was an eco-terrorist with an electron microscope and a tray of smallmouth bass eggs. The idea had come when a colleague explained to me how at the University of Guelph they routinely disabled the DNA strand which stopped the growth process in salmon embryos, then sat back to see how big the hatchlings could get. She showed me pictures of healthy salmon fry which weighed thirty times those in the control group. I had also found a newspaper article which recounted a similar experiment in New Zealand where researchers eventually became afraid of their salmon when they surpassed 750 kg, took on an ugly green hue and sprouted hugely distorted lumps on their skulls. The researchers destroyed them all when an autopsy on one revealed that the creatures were fertile. The kids and parents who read the book thought it was fun, if a bit far-fetched, but it turns out I couldn’t make up anything half as wild as the stories which have appeared in prominent Canadian newspapers, Maclean’s Magazine, on CBC news and even the Internet about the latest threat sweeping up the Mississippi watershed and lurking in the fish markets of Toronto and Ottawa.
The monsters of the hour are silver and big-head carp, imported to the United States from Asia in the 1970’s to clear catfish ponds and sewage lagoons of algae. The myth holds that flooding of the Mississippi in the ‘90s released many of the voracious fish from captivity. This summer The Toronto Star’s Peter Gorrie reported that the silver and bighead carp “now make up more than 95 per cent, by weight, of all the animal matter in parts of the Mississippi system (Toronto Star, May 20, 2007).” Becky Cudmore, research biologist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, reported that nine out of ten fish they sampled in the Illinois River were Asian carp (London Free Press, July 27, 2007).
A counterpoint came immediately from Duane C. Chapman, USGS Fisheries Biologist, when he saw my blog entry and sent along a much more sensible perspective on the carp infestation. He told me that an individual net may very well haul out all carp, but that doesn’t mean that the river is full of them. He sent me some census statistics that showed very few carp in the system even though the commercial harvest of silver and bighead carp was expanding exponentially at the time. He explained that a lot depends upon where you look and the type of net you use. Chapman made it clear that the 95% statistic is a wild exaggeration.
No one questions, however, the silver carp’s reputation for bizarre behaviour: when startled by an outboard motor the fish leap up to eight feet out of the water, often landing in the boat. YouTube has a number of videos of this spectacular activity. Internet clips of tourists getting shelled by large silver fish are fun to watch, but I certainly wouldn’t want it to happen on Newboro Lake. In one of the USGS publications which I read the author commented that the leaping fish have made it prohibitively dangerous to water ski on the Illinois River. He likened impact from leaping fish to getting hit by bowling balls at random intervals. The Lacey Act (2006) itself refers to the tremendous leaping power of the silver carp creating a hazard for boaters and fishermen.
At some point in Chicago’s checkered past engineers dug a canal to divert sewage south to the Mississippi in an attempt to lessen pollution levels in Lake Michigan. Thus the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Watershed are connected by the Illinois River. For years the untreated runoff from meat processing plants and heavy industries protected Lake Michigan from the carp invasion through the Chicago canal, but now the EPA has forced polluters to clean up their act, allowing the carp a non-toxic route north.
At the moment all that stands in the way of a fully-blown invasion is a system of electrodes rigged across the canal to deter the fish. Imagine one of those invisible fences for your dog. Commercial tugs still move barges through this canal, so the water carried in the vessels’ bilges is a major threat to the the Great Lakes. You may recall that zebra mussels hitched a ride from the Adriatic in the bilges of freighters a few years ago.
Even scarier are older news stories still current on the Internet. One reports an Asian carp caught in the St. Clair River by a commercial fisherman, but spookiest of all is the report that bighead carp are available live in fish markets in Ottawa and Toronto. (Zev Singer, The Ottawa Citizen, Thursday, March 13, 2003). The Ontario Government quickly banned the live sale of carp in 2004, and required that only sterile carp be allowed live into the country.
Duane Chapman explained that The Lacey Act in 2006 added the silver carp and the large-scaled silver carp to its list of injurious wildlife species, thus banning the transportation of the fish across state lines or out of the country. The act bans both diploid and triploid versions of the fish, but Chapman pointed out that there is no such thing as a triploid (genetically sterile) silver or bighead carp. Only for the very different grass carp have scientists developed a sterile variant. Still, with the ban stopping the traffic from Arkansas to Ontario, the odds of a live adult silver carp hopping out of a tank and into the Rideau River are very low.
But the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources reports another disturbing trend: fully half of minnow buckets are dumped back into the lake at the end of fishing trips, and a carp fry looks very much like any of its cousins in the minnow family.
Chapman emphatically agrees on this point: “These fish are easy to transport in a bait bucket, as are many other undesirable fish, and diseases. Wild-caught bait should never, ever, be used in a body of water other than where it was captured, whether you release your bait afterward or not. Purchased bait should not be released alive.”
The reason for the alarm is that these species of carp have a reputation for eating their way through the entire ecosystem of a lake. The only disagreement has to do with how quickly they can do it. The papers this year have claimed that a female silver or bighead can lay one or two million eggs at a hatch. (The Lacey Act offers a more modest figure of 400,000 eggs for a large female.) They reach spawning maturity early, and they compete relentlessly with native species. Chapman’s current research concerns the analysis of how much damage the silver and bighead carp have done to the areas they have invaded.
“I have data … that shows that zooplankton populations in the low velocity habitats used by bighead and silver carps (together, known as the “bigheaded carps”) are MUCH lower than prior to the invasion. These things do not bode well for native fishes, especially fishes that require the same habitats as bigheaded carps and that are planktivorous throughout their life (like paddlefish, bigmouth buffalo, and the important preyfish gizzard shad). But we have not yet been totally overrun by these fish to the loss of all our native fish. Our primary sportfish here in the Missouri River is catfish, and the catfishing is still world class. Time will tell what we see in the future. Predictions are tough, although risk assessments on these fish are uniform in the opinion that it would be risky to have these fish invade.”
Perhaps Maclean’s writer Danylo Hawaleshka exceeded the mark last summer when he wrote “The barbarian is at the gate!” but the message is clear to the fishermen of Ontario: if you don’t want to get shelled by flying carp, take great care with your minnow bucket.
References:
Correspondence with Duane C. Chapman, Research Fisheries Biologist, United States Geological Service, Columbia Environmental Research Center, January, 2008.
Peter Gorrie, The Toronto Star, Gluttony, thy name is Asian Carp, May 20, 2007
http://ottawariverkeeper.ca/news/invasive_asian_carp_sold_alive_in_ottawa_fish_markets/
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Science/2007/0…373151-sun.html
Click to access SAR-AS2005_001_e.pdf
http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=20060417_125346_125346
The Battle of Apple Hill
December 28, 2007
Irwin Smythe drove his Cadillac down the ramp one Friday evening in early August, got out, slammed the door and stalked down the dock without a look at anyone. Every ounce of his 340 pounds radiated outrage. He had the bearing of a man, not just angry, but on the verge of a heart attack.
After a while, the groceries and his wife Eleanor stowed aboard their houseboat, Irwin took the car back up to the parking lot and made his way back down to the porch, where he unloaded his tale of woe.
Irwin and Eleanor had bought this bass boat, one with a zillion horsepower, a trolling motor, and enough electronics to knock out a submarine. He had rented an extra slip for it at the marina, so that it would always be ready for them to use. But Irwin hadn’t finished at this point. He decided that the sun was too hot for Eleanor when they were fishing, so he had a bimini top built for the boat, with special supports to hold the shade in place at the 70 miles per hour the thing could do.
Irwin wanted only the best, and this went for tackle and bait, as well. He tried all of the catalogue specials, and they had worked reasonably well throughout the month of July, but August bass wanted frogs, and so Irwin gave up on artificials in favour of the real thing. He even modified one of the wells on the boat to make a vivarium for frogs. Though he killed them before he put them on a hook, up to that time Irwin’s frogs lived in air-conditioned comfort in his black, metal-flake, Ranger bass boat.
Notwithstanding his expensive equipment, Irwin got his frogs the same way the rest of us did, by catching them in the parking lot. None of Irwin’s high-tech toys paid off like his two-dollar butterfly net. With his bulk, Irwin needed the net to catch the frogs, but with it he proved a crafty and successful frogger.
The bass had been biting, and the parking lot was running temporarily short of frogs. Irwin decided that there was some nice moist grass a couple of miles down the road, in a rural suburb known as Apple Hill. Irwin vaguely knew the developer from his real estate dealings, so he got the fellow’s number from his secretary, and had a word with him on his car-phone about his bait-supply problem. The developer told Irwin to go ahead and send his crew over to pick frogs.
Irwin’s “crew” this Friday afternoon had consisted of one man, Irwin, still in a white shirt and tie, but with tennis shoes and a pair of fluorescent green Bermuda shorts. Eleanor chose to relax in the idling Cadillac with the air conditioning set at glacial and the CD player whispering Vivaldi.
Irwin had removed one of his socks when he changed his shoes, because we had taught him that the most efficient and humane way to transport frogs was in a woollen sock, slightly dampened. (The wool wicks the moisture off, thereby cooling the frogs and keeping them more comfortable.) Eleanor’s bottle of Perrier lay empty and abandoned on the hood of the car.
Mrs. Emily Penney was returning from an expedition to a craft store in Westport, thinking half about her new garden sculpture by Doef, and half about what to serve her future son-in-law for tomorrow’s dinner when she encountered, parked on the grass at the approach to her home, an idling, white Cadillac. A large, dishevelled man with a butterfly net, ludicrous trousers and one sock, was hopping around her lawn, waving the net at what appeared to be pieces of clover, then pouncing, only to come up with delight clutching a small, quivering object, which he would promptly thrust deep into the bowels of an executive-length sock, tie the sock, and repeat the process.
Mrs. Penney watched this for some moments, then, realizing that the pursued were frogs, rather than some sort of loathsome insect, decided that she must do her part to save the wetlands of Ontario. She drove up behind the idling Cadillac, shut off her Subaru, and slammed the door behind her as she strode to confront this intruder.
This broke Irwin’s concentration, and he looked up with annoyance after missing a nice green leopard.
“Those are my frogs.”
“What?” Irwin asked.
“I said, those are my frogs. This is my property, and those are my frogs. Would you please leave?”
“Lady, I just talked to the developer, Stan Miller, on my car phone on the way through Portland, and this lot is still for sale. You don’t own it, the corporation does.”
“Those are still my frogs.”
“How can they be your frogs? They’re not on your land, I’m not on your land, and the frogs are all jumping into the ditch as we speak. Now what’s your problem?”
“Those frogs have grown up in Apple Hill. I live in Apple Hill. We are fellow residents, and we are not about to have you hooligans from a campground come over here to traipse around our lawns with butterfly nets.” Mrs. Penny ran out of breath at about the same time that she ran out of invective, and so subsided with a puff. We could imagine Irwin’s face turning from pink, to red, to bluish black. Perhaps he remembered to breathe in time, because we hadn’t heard any ambulances.
Anyway, Irwin backed down, with little grace, one might guess, still clutching a half-dozen spotted hostages. Her voice rang out once more: “Give me back my frogs. You may not kidnap them to use for your purposes.” Irwin clutched the sock to his chest, climbed into his car, and backed out to the road in a cloud of dust. Mrs. Penney, satisfied that she had done her bit for the environment and all of the loathsome creatures in it, drove her Subaru in triumph the remaining fifty feet to her driveway.
We felt badly for Irwin, and a little frightened for his health. This was the angriest we had ever seen him, and he normally had blood pressure that a giraffe would respect.
So we hid our smiles and started a discussion about who owned the frogs. Bloody-minded crew that we were, we could find no one to argue the Apple Hill side, so we decided to ask for a judicial review.
Out of Irwin’s earshot we approached His Worship, Justin Paul with the facts of the case, and asked him for a judgement. Jack did a creditable job of describing how Irwin must have appeared chasing frogs with a butterfly net, and Justin had a hard time containing his mirth, especially when Jack, an unconscious mimic, re-created both sides of Irwin’s dialogue with Mrs. Penney. Finally, the judge announced his intention to consider this in chambers, and went off to his boat for an afternoon nap.
A few days later, Justin announced that he was prepared to deliver his judgement on the case of Smythe versus Penney. We all gathered round and His Worship began:
“In Ancient England there were common lands where the villagers could graze their cattle on the grass, and take them home to milk later. The precedent for this case comes from the ancient English common law which governed the possession of cattle and other livestock ranging upon the common land.
“Mrs. Penney’s claim to the frogs depends entirely upon the state of mind of each frog at the time of the dispute. Before the law there are two possible states of mind for an animal: animus fruendi, and animus revertendi, that is, the impulse to flee, or the impulse to come to its owner, when called. The villagers proved ownership of their livestock by calling their animals off the common.
“Mrs. Penney does, indeed, own the frogs. All she has to do is call them. Any and all of the frogs which come when she calls them, belong to her. If they do not come when she calls them, or if they flee at her approach, they are fair game for anyone else on the common.”
We greatly admired this judgement, particularly his informed use of Latin, but by now Irwin had cooled down, was catching bass on surface plugs, and Eleanor thought it probably would be best not to disturb him with the news. Still, we liked the ring of animus revertendi, and we still talk about the Battle of Apple Hill.
Copyright, Rod Croskery, 1995
Letter to The Toronto Star: Whose job is it to protect the fish?
December 14, 2007
Mr. Urquhart, Ms. Doolittle, Mr. Rush:
I grew up in Westport, a small tourist community just north of Kingston, Ontario. Throughout my childhood my favourite pastime was fishing off the many docks and bridges around the village. The Department of Lands and Forests had its headquarters in Westport as well, and everyone knew the rules: don’t keep undersized bass, clean and eat what you catch, and most of all, NEVER EVEN THINK of dropping a line into the Fish Sanctuary. The Pond, as the sanctuary is known locally, houses the breeding stock for the local fish hatchery run by the Ministry of Natural Resources.
Imagine my amazement when at a grade-eight reunion this summer a classmate, now a member of the Westport Town Council, told me how town residents have been unable to do anything about van-loads of men coming into town after dark and fishing all night in the sanctuary, keeping everything they catch. Jackie Brady told me that repeated calls to the Ministry of Natural Resources did not produce any enforcement activity because, in her words, “They couldn’t afford the overtime.”
Then an incident involving locals and Asian fishermen from Toronto hit the front page of The Star last summer and was reported as a hate crime. I sent in a correction at that time, hoping that further investigation would produce a more balanced look at the situation, but no one responded.
This week in my blog I included a couple of excerpts from the annual report of the Auditor-General of Ontario. The report states unequivocally on p. 153 that conservation officers are unable to work nights unless authorized to do so by their superiors (See two blog entries down from this one). This is consistent with what Jackie told me. One issue, then, is the absence of conservation officers at the time that the fishermen seem to prefer to participate in their sport.
Another issue may well have to do with language. The earlier report’s quotations were translated from Mandarin, according to the article. No mention was made of the fishermen’s understanding of the regulations, or even if they held valid fishing licenses. Are Westport residents to be condemned as racist if night-time visitors ignore the rules, trespass and litter, and systematically plunder the lifeblood of the community? Ignorance of the language and the laws is no justification for poaching, and yet Toronto journalists don’t seem to look much further than that dreadful phrase involving wet Japanese to find a headline.
I’ll close with a little personal anecdote. On an October Sunday this year I ran around Indian Lake a bit in my boat to see if I could find a splake. Nothing was happening so I docked at the upper side of Chaffey’s Lock and walked over the embankment to an area below the mill where the current runs out into Opinicon Lake. An Asian man who was fishing off the point on the other side of the canal took one look at me and quickly left the area. I noticed that his line held a distinctive orange bobber. The fish weren’t biting below the lock and I soon returned to my boat.
Five days later I walked down the point to fish from shore. I caught a nice splake and carried it up the bank to a flat spot. At that point I noticed a very expensive G. Loomis spinning rod, neatly disassembled and held together with elastic bands, lying in a juniper bush. The distinctive orange bobber was still on the line. I picked up the rod and took it home for safekeeping.
Before this gets reported as a racist attack I’d better specify that the young Asian man in question was tall and very fit. I’m fiftyish and short, gray-haired. My friends suggested that the only thing frightening about me might have been my green rain suit and Tilley hat. The man might have mistaken me for a conservation officer and abandoned his gear.
G. Loomis spinning rods are valuable, but I’m a bait-casting fan and have no use for it. I’d be glad to return the rod to the man who abandoned it. All he has to do is show me his fishing license.
Ms. Doolittle’s article in today’s _Star_ is obviously the cause of this note. Once again it looks at the fishing issue from a racial perspective. I’d suggest from a lifetime of angling around Westport that there may well be a better-reasoned way to address the facts as you have them, starting with the shocking lack of resources provided to conservation officers to do their jobs. Please read the Auditor-General’s Report, Enforcement Activity, pp. 151-153.
Thank you for your time and attention,
Yours sincerely,
Rod Croskery
UPDATE: December 20, 2007
Check out Marco Smits’ series on this issue in The Review-Mirror at
the Walnut Diary 