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A plague will infest eels in the St Lawrence river. Shipments to the US will stop. Eels will sell for $12 each, when you can find them, but then rise to over $20 an eel when unscrupulous Italian investors corner the market. At first there will be huge die offs of eel fishermen all along the Northeast. At the canal, their carcasses will create such a rat problem the Army Core of Engineers will propose collecting them for sale as lobster bait........but the public eventually objects because of water pollution concerns so they are shipped to North Carolina...purportedly to be made into pig feed....but actually diverted to sausage factories and sold to more unscrupulous Italian marketeers.
Of course some of the more hardy variety of eel fishermen, such as the species that interbreed in Franklin, will try to survive by switching to rubber. Most will get it wrong, have trouble casting Trojans, and also perish......left to compost pungently along the access road, noticed only by the dogs that roll in them. A few others, less fortunate, will discover lead jigs and devolve into sullen, grunting, humpbacked creatures, doomed to silently heave and haul their heavy dull offerings through the deep, cold, black waters.
But all will not be sad, for a chosen few, the brightest and best of their kind (sorry Back Beach), facing Nature's unyielding impetus to evolve or perish, will be saved. Not that it will be easy. It will take years of work and frustration, necessitate hard sacrifice and hours of time on the buy/sell forums, but eventually....like a Phoenix from the ashes....these fortunate few crude eel fishermen will shed their primitive form and..... thru the miracle of metamorphosis, the wonder of evolution, and the grace of God's hand......be reborn as the epitome of the fishing world, the highest and noblest of all that hunt the striped bass.....a PLUG FISHERMAN......except for a few guys who suffer chromosomal damage in the process and buy fly rods instead.
Alleluia and Amen.
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