I live in the great state of Alaska, in the city these days, but when I was a kid I used to live in the boonies. When I say the boonies, I don’t mean a 30 mile town with 15,000 people in it, I mean a 80 mile town with 2,000 residents. In this fine small town we have about 15 full time Fish and Game wardens/lackeys. Alaska makes about 2 billion dollars a year off of the fishing industry, so whenever the fishing populace seems to be threatened, the dicks in Anchorage send out fish & game to go and catch a few poachers, put them in the paper, and say "Here, we are cracking down" even though the problem is the poachers at most gets hundreds of fish, where the commercial fisherman over fish hundreds of thousands.
For those whom are unaware of the major ass raping that takes place when you accidentally break a fishing game law, Ill put it bluntly. They take your tools, and your transportation, then they take the game you achieve, and it all goes to them, so they can later that day do the same shit you just got busted for. Suffice to say, as a kid, I learned to avoid getting caught. So here are some of my better stories.
I was about 11 at the time, I had a $60 Shakespeare rod and reel I got at a local church sale. The silver salmon just came in and tourists where showing up the next week to start fishing, so I had a week to plan. I first went down to the mouth of the Little Susitna river, I took two long rods of rebar, my lucky hatchet (lucky because it never drew more than half a pint of my blood, considering the average from other tools, that’s pretty lucky) a ball of twine, and two cinder blocks. My dad sharpened the rebar before I left, and I went and started my work. I found a good cotton wood log, after skinning it with the hatchet (the bark comes off like a tough banana peel) I bent the two pieces of rebar at a good angle, and then sunk them into the soft wood. I then stripped and went into the water, I took a rough estimate how deep the river was, and then tied my twine to the cinder blocks, and then to the rebar.
After sinking it to where it couldn’t be seen that entirely well (I figured the look would change from white to brown in a few days) I went back a few more times and set other logs like this. The week came, and the fishing was good, there was about 400 tourists taking over the river, and so I used the mass of the crowd to go grossly over the limit. After limiting out, I fished with another intention; I would catch a fish down the bank, and then lead it up the river. Id play it really hard and make it seem like it’s the big one, then jig my arm and lose the fish near the log trap. People would cast in and claim they felt it, then lose it. Soon tons of people where fishing there, few realized that the fishing down the river was just as good, and that the big hit they got was in fact a snag. At night Id strip down again, and my brother and I would go into the water, and slip lures off of the logs. Well I worked this way for about four weeks when I should have realized something. I was in the water, I had my empty bucket out and my cloths where safely stashed with my bike (few people notice a half naked kid at night... they just figure a priest is by) when we where flashed. Fish and Game was on the shore and their boat was nearby. They had out 10,000 candle lights and where blinding us telling us that they figured out why they had gotten so few lures for the past few weeks.
There never where natural snags on that part of the river bank, so they knew something was wrong when people where leaving pissed. Fish and game goes to the places where there are natural snags, and takes the lures every day, then set the snag back into the water to get it. When they went in with a net in the water, they pulled up one of the logs and realized that someone was cheating them. So began my long swim. They tried to follow me on the boat, and one guy even tried keeping up through swimming, but they where lacking the fear of getting a belt from their fathers, I and my brother where not. We spent a few hours and went back for our cloths and bikes, we made it back home and put our efforts into sorting the lures we would sale next year. We sold the lures and made a good profit the year after that, and I wonder just what kind of asskicking I would have gotten if they realized that we made 600 bucks each. I never did the trick again, I got to interested into RPG's and hunting (that’s fishing but with a better chance of maiming for you non-outdoorsmen) but some days I think about just sinking a log and watching the weekend warriors struggle to get the big one.
