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Originally Posted by Eben
Just to clarrify my story, i get down there and these guys had 4 flats of mackeral that were uncut- who knows how much they had already cut up and tossed. They had a 12 pack of budwieser and more thanhalf was empty.
Nothing burns me up when i get down to some of the spots in gansett only to see trash left from fishermen.. im not pointing fingers, but most if not all trash is left by bait fishermen.... to me, they are the enemy. because of them, they get spots closed down. .. okay back to the story. I talked to them for a few minutes to see how they were doing and these guys had no respect for the ocean.. every bluefish they reeled in they punted back, or threw in a tidal pool to die they even told me that any bass they caught under 34 inches was going back too, which only told me that they had connections to commercial sales.... Not cool IMO.. After sizing them up for a while, i made the decsion to go jedi on them and tell them that the bass werent around..
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I could pretty much tell that from the get-go. The fact that they so willingly gave you 4 flats of macks tells me they weren't about to take that bait home, bag it, and freeze it for future use. At best, they would have tossed the rest of it in and left the stinking cardboard on the rocks. Chances are, the macks would have been left there to rot, or else tossed in some brush.
I'll help out anyone who looks like they have respect for the sport, and who looks like he or she wants to make an effort to learn. I won't lift a finger for someone I peg as a lazy slob who's looking for instant success without doing a little work on his own. I also actively discourage people who are going to jeopardize my continued access. There is nothing morally wrong with running a snow job on people who don't belong there in the first place, and whose continued presence at a spot is going to result in your being denied precious access.
On the other hand, I've always lived by the rule that the guy who gets there first has the right to fish a spot the way he wants. If I want to drag bottom with a bucktail, or drift a plug or an eel in an outflow, and there's a guy there with a 10 wt fly rod doing his thing, I either fish around him or go somewhere else. While I hate to generalize, the guy with the fly rod probably shares the same ethic I do with respect to leaving a place as he found it and being circumspect about access issues. Here on the South Shore, there's a guy named Anthony who I know slightly, who likes to fish a certain bridge shadow line with his fly rod. He's pretty much a fly purist now. Times when a few regulars have arrived with their surf gear, Anthony has no problem adjusting to the flow to let everyone fish, and we do the same for him. Mutual respect goes a long way, but it's something sadly lacking in most of the slobs out there.
Now, if the chap with the long wand doesn't want to play ball and let me fish the place too, that's a whole different kettle of fish---I've never seen a 10 wt yet that could win a tug of war with a 9-1/2' Fisher and a conventional spooled with 50# braid
