Conference wahoo::fishing

	    Dad's fishing lessons aren't what you'd call keepers

						-- by Dave Barry

       The first time I taught my son, Robert, how to fish was in 1982,
    when he was 2.  I did it the old-fashioned way:  I took him to the
    K mart with Uncle Joe, our old friend and lawyer, to pick out a
    Complete Fishing Outfit for $12.97.  Then we went to a pond, where
    Robert sat in the weeds and put pond muck in his hair while Uncle Joe
    and I tried to bait the hook with a living breathing thinking feeling
    caring earthworm.  This is a very difficult thing, emotionally, and
    not just for the earthworm.  It would be different if worms gave you
    some reason to feel hostile toward them, such as they had little faces
    that looked like Geraldo Rivera.  That would be no problem.
       But the way worms are now, they make it very hard, writhing around
    and conveying, by means of body language and worm guts squirting out,
    the concept of:  "Please please oh please Mr. Human Being, don't stick
    this hook into me."  For my money, worms are far better at this kind of
    non-verbal communication than those people called "mimes" who paint
    their faces all white and repeatedly attempt to entertain you at street
    festivals, although to be absolutely certain, we would have to run an
    experiment wherein we baited a hook with a live mime.
       I think it would be more humane if we just forgot about bait
    altogether and shot the fish directly with guns, the way we do with
    rabbits and deer.  I saw Roy Scheider take this approach to angling in
    the movie "Jaws I," and he got himself a real prize trophy shark using
    a rifle for a weapon and Richard Dreyfuss for bait.  Unfortunately,
    this turned out to be a violation of our outmoded game laws, so Roy had
    to throw the shark back, which turned out to be highly fatal to several
    dozen teen-agers and a helicopter in "Jaws II."  This is a totally
    unnecessary outrage, if you ask me, especially when you consider that
    it is *not* illegal to catch deer with rod and reel in most states.
    (EDITOR'S NOTE:  He's raving.  Pay no attention.)
       Nevertheless, Robert and Uncle Joe and I did manage to land a fish,
    the kind veteran anglers call a "bluegill."  It was three to four
    ounces of well-contained fury, and it fought like a frozen bagel.
       The fish we caught was a cute fish, a fish that would star in a
    Walt Disney animated cartoon feature called "Billy Bluegill Learns the
    True Meaning of Christmas."  Robby looked at it, then he looked at
    Uncle Joe and me with a look of great upset in his 2-year-old eyes,
    and we realized, being responsible grown-ups, that it was time to lie.
    "The fish doesn't feel it!" we announced brightly, almost in unison.
    "You see this sharp barbed metal hook going right through his lip?  It
    doesn't hurt a bit!  Ha ha!!"  Meanwhile Billy the Bluegill was of
    course edging out the worm for the Academy Award for Best Performance
    by a Cold-Blooded Animal Gasping and Writhing Around to Indicate
    Extreme Pain.  And so Uncle Joe, being an attorney, got Billy off the
    hook (Get it?), and we put him (Billy) back into the pond.
       After that, Robert and I didn't go fishing for several years, until
    last Christmas, when we went up to New York and Uncle Phil -- who is
    not our attorney but Robert affectionately calls him "uncle" anyway
    because he is my brother -- bought Robert *another* fishing rod,
    meaning I had to teach him *again.*  Fortunately, there were no worms
    available, as they had all attempted to migrate South, getting as far
    as the toll booths on the New Jersey Turnpike.
       So Robert and I used "lures," which are these comical devices that
    veteran anglers instinctively buy from catalogs.  You would think that,
    to be effective, lures would have to look like creatures that a fish
    might actually eat, but, in fact, they look like what you would expect
    to see crawling around on the Planet Zork during periods of intense
    radioactivity.  For example, many lures have propellers, which you
    rarely see in the Animal Kingdom.  In my opinion, the way lures
    actually work is that the fish sees one go by, and they get to laughing
    so hard and thrashing around that occasionally one of them snags itself
    on the hooks.  Back in the Pre-Puberty Era, I used to spend hundreds of
    hours lure-fishing with my friend Tom Parker and his faithful dog Rip,
    and the only distinct memory I have of us catching anything besides
    giant submerged logs was the time Tom was using a lure called a "Lazy
    Ike" and it was attacked with stunning ferocity by his faithful dog, Rip.
       So, fortunately, Robert and I didn't catch anything the second time
    I taught him how to fish, and I think he's now old enough to remember
    it clearly and thus never ask me to teach him again.  That's the good
    news.  The bad news is, I am sure that one of these days he's going to
    want to have a "catch."

       [w/out permission from San Jose Mercury News, January 31, 1987]
               [Yeah, January -- better late than never...!]
    

		THE CASE OF THE AMOROUS TURTLE

	By Dave Barry, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist
     copied from the Boston Sunday Globe, October 22, 1989

You can imagine how alarmed I was when I found out that I had been swimming in
the same waters as the Giant Perverted Turtle.  Unless of course you have not
yet heard about the Giant Perverted Turtle, in which case please be advised
that, until we get this thing cleared up, you should avoid submerging yourself
in any body of water unless it has a drain and a soap dish.

I found out about this story when numerous alert readers sent me an article 
from The Reporter, a newspaper published in the Florida Keys, headlined TURTLE
ATTACK IS REPORTED.  Immediately, I interrupted my regular journalism routine
of staring fixedly at individual pieces of ceiling dirt, because it just so
happens that my major hobby, aside from turning off lights and appliances that
have been turned on days earlier by my son, is scuba diving off the Florida
Keys.  You go out to the reef, bouncing over the waves, then you dive in and
admire the incredible variety of marine life that is attracted by other diving
enthusiasts barfing over the side of the charter boat.

No, really, you see some fascinating things down there.  I once got to see what
fishing looks like from the fish end.  There, dangling in the current, was a
largish hook, to which had been attached a disgusting thing such as you might be
served in a sushi restaurant.  Staring at this thing was a small gathering of
filefish, which is a fish with pursed lips and a bulging forehead that make it
look very serious, as though it should be carrying a little briefcase and doing
other fishes' tax returns.  As the other filefish watched, the first one would
swim forward, take the sushi in its mouth, spit out immediately, then swim to
the end of the line.  Then the next fish would repeat the procedure, and the
next, and so on.  ("Yuck!  You try it, Norm!" "OK!  Yuck!  You try it, Walter!" 
"OK!  Yuck!  You try it...")  If I had a waterproof pen and paper with me, I'd
have stuck a little note on the hook saying *"They don't like it."*

This experience gave me an idea.  Remember a couple of months back when
President Bush was taking his biweekly vacation up Kenneth E. Bunkport IV,
Maine, and he failed to catch any fish, day after day, until it became a
national news story of greater urgency than Lebanon, and the whole federal
government apparatus seemed to shudder to a halt while the Leader of the Free
World, the man most responsible for dealing with pressing and increasingly
complex national and international issues, was off somewhere trying to outwit
an organism with a brain the size of a hydrogen atom?  Well my idea is, next
time we have this problem, we send some US naval frogpersons down there to
attach a fish manually to the presidential hook.  These would have to be
trusted frogpersons, not pranksters, because America would definitely be a
laughingstock among nations if the president were to engage in a fierce three-
hour angling struggle and finally, triumphantly, haul out, say, a sheep.

But before we implement this program, we need to do something about the Giant
Perverted Turtle.  According to The Reporter article, written by outdoor writer
Bob T. Epstein, there's a very aggressive male 300-pound loggerhead turtle that
lurks in the water under one of the bridges in the Florida Keys and  - I am not
making this up - keeps trying, very forcefully, to *mate with human divers*. 
What is worse, Epstein says, in at least one case the turtle actually
*succeeded*.  I'm not going to give the details of this occurrence in a family
newspaper, except  to say that if we ever decide we need some form of
punishment harsher than the death penalty, this would be a strong candidate.

	JUDGE:  I sentence the defendant to be put in the lagoon with Bart.

	DEFENDANT:  No!  Not the turtle!

I called up one of the divers who'd reportedly been attacked, a real estate
agent named Bruce Gernon, who confirmed the whole thing, but asked me to stress
that he successfully fought the turtle off.  So let the record show that the
turtle did not get to first base with Mr. Gernon.  But clearly we have a
serious problem here.  Bob Epstein told me that, since his story appeared, he
has been contacted almost daily by people who have been molested by large sea
creatures but never told anybody.  "This is a sensitive area," Epstein said. 
"People are reluctant to talk about that aspect of their relationships with
turtles or seals or dolphins or walruses."

Did you hear that?  *Walruses*.

	(DEFENDANT:  *Nooooo!*)

Fortunately, this alarming story is getting attention from leading science
authorities:  Epstein told me  he has been contacted by both the Letterman
*and* Sajak shows.  So action is being taken, and not a moment too soon,
either, because - this appears to be a related story - several alert readers
have sent me an Associated Press article stating that two marine biologists in
a submarine 690 feet deep, far off the coast of Alaska, discovered, lying on
the ocean floor: a cow.  I am still not making this up.  Needless to say, the
cow was deceased.  God alone knows how it got there.  One obvious possibility
is prankster frogpersons, but we cannot rule out the possibility that the cow
was abducted by lust-crazed walruses.  Fortunately, the biologists were able to
make a videotape, starring Rob Lowe, so we should have some answers soon. 
Until then, I'm not going to even take a *shower*.  Not that this is anything
new.

	Our topic today, in ``The Sportsperson's Corner,'' is: Fishing Tips.
	Call me a masculine stud hombre if you wish, but fishing is in my
bloodstream. This was also true of Ernest Hemingway, who wrote the
masterpiece fishing novel ``The Old Man and the Sea,'' later released as
the major motion picture ``Jaws.'' It's the gripping story of an old man
in a tiny boat who hooks a giant fish and fights it for days on the open
ocean, surrounded by increasing literary tension, until finally, in a
shocking and unforgettable ending, something happens that unfortunately
I am not aware of because I never finished the book. I read it in high
school, when my literary strategy was to read exactly enough to write a
book report. Using standard high-school book-report style, I could
sometimes write a 500-word report after reading ONLY THE TITLE:
	```The Old Man and the Sea' is a short novel weighing less than two
pounds written by the author, Ernest Hemingway. It concerns an old man
who becomes involved with the sea (or, as it is sometimes called, ``the
ocean''). As the book (``The Old Man and the Sea'') unfolds, the author,
Ernest Hemingway, writes about these two major themes -- (1) the old man,
and (2) the sea -- and the things that happen to both the main character,
which is the old man, and a major body of water, played by the sea, as
viewed by the author, Ernest Hemingway, and as we reach the 106-word
mark in this book report we can see that ... ''
	And so on. Book reports are excellent training for journalism, the
essence of which is writing authoritative stories about things you don't
actually understand. I can remember, as a young reporter, writing
lengthy, disapproving analyses of international banking practices at a
time when my personal investment portfolio consisted entirely of
discount pizza coupons.
	But that is not my point. I have forgotten my point. No! Wait! My
point is that rugged outdoorspersons such as Ernest Hemingway and myself
are crazy for fishing. Although I frankly have never been fond of bait.
I still vividly recall a Bait Encounter I had on Stephen Heyman's 12th
birthday party, when his father took a bunch of us boys deep-sea
fishing. We got out on the sea (or, as it is sometimes called, ``the
ocean''), many miles from safety, and Mr. Heyman opened a cardboard box,
and out came: giant mutated worms. I have always been fond of regular
worms, because they're small and harmless in the sense of having no
appendages or mouths, plus they are very slow. You rarely read about
people being run down and savaged by packs of worms.
	But the worms that emerged from Mr. Heyman's box were more the size
of adolescent snakes, plus they had somehow developed LEGS. They started
striding brazenly around the boat, obviously aware that they outnumbered
us.
	So we boys were backing away, thinking about leaping overboard,
when Mr. Heyman, in an act of great foolhardiness, picked up one of the
worms WITH HIS NAKED FINGERS and put it on a hook. Of course this
infuriated the worm, not to mention the onlooker worms, who were clearly
thinking: ``OK, if we can develop legs, there's no reason why we can't
develop HIGHLY TOXIC STINGERS and ...''
	So I spent the afternoon at the front (or ``nonworm'') end of the
boat, admiring the ever-changing beauty of the sea and idly throwing up
into it. At the other end, Mr. Heyman continued to wrestle with the worm
and eventually used it to capture a flounder, which -- although nobody
realized this at the time -- is an extremely dangerous fish in the sense
that it will sometimes explode. I know this because dozens of alert
readers mailed me a recent newspaper article concerning a woman in
Wellington, New Zealand, who was preparing a flounder for dinner when --
this is a direct quote -- ``It blew up.'' (The article states that police
are ``baffled.'')
	I would like to dismiss this as an isolated incident, but I also
happen to know a famous minor radio personality named (really) Jimmy
Music, who does a fishing show in the Florida Keys, and who informs me
that sharks also sometimes explode. Jimmy states that sharks can contain
``an incredible amount of stomach gas'' and will sometimes burst upon
capture, causing anglers to become drenched with stomach contents. I'm
sure this raises some troubling questions in your mind, including:
	1. Why do we call them ``anglers''?
	2. Wouldn't ``Shark Puke'' be a good name for a rock band?
	3. How about ``Jimmy Music and the Stomach Contents''?
	I don't know about the rest of you sportspersons, but until I get
some solid answers to these questions, I do not intend to angle or
become otherwise involved with any fish that is not in the form of a
frozen stick. That's how I feel, as we reach, at last, the 834-word mark
in this column.
------------------
w/o permission from:	
	(C) 1990 THE MIAMI HERALD
	DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
    

    AND THE US ARMED FORCES DID, IN FACT, HAVE BATS IN THEIR BOMBERS

             by Dave Barry, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist

          copied from the Boston Sunday Globe, December 9, 1990


        We certainly do not wish to cause widespread panic, but we are
    hereby warning the public to be on the lookout for falling trout.

        We base this warning on an alarming article from The Bangor
    Daily News, sent in by alert reader Jane Heart, headlined "Torpedo
    Approach Used To Stock Lakes With Trout."  According the article, 
    the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries is restocking lakes by 
    dropping trout from airplanes.  A hatchery official notes that the 
    trout which weigh abouta pound each, drop from 100 to 150 feet "like 
    hundreds of little torpedos."

        This article should cause extreme concern on the part of
    anyone who is familiar with gravity, which was discovered in 1684
    by Sir Isaac Newton, who was sitting under a tree when an apple
    landed on his head, killing him instantly.  A one-pound trout
    would be even worse.  According to our calculations, if you
    dropped the trout from 150 feet, it would reach a speed of...let's
    see, 150 time 32 feet per second, at two pints to the liter, minus
    the radius of the hypotenuse, comes to...a *high rate of speed.* 
    Anybody who has ever seen a photograph showing the kind of damage
    that a trout traveling that fast can inflict on the human skull
    knows that such photographs are very valuable.  I paid $20 for
    mine.

        And yet here we see Maine, which we usually think of as a
    quiet, responsible state known primarily for sleet, deliberately
    causing potentially lethal fish to hurtle at high velocities
    toward the Earth, residence of many members of the public.

        Oh, I realize the program is not *designed* to harm the
    public.  But even highly trained pilots are not perfect.  Consider
    the three pilots who were recently convicted for flying drunk on a
    commercial flight, during which they aroused suspician by
    instructing the passengers to fasten their seat belts because of
    "snakes in the engine."  I am not accusing the Maine Department of
    Inland Fisheries of using drunk pilots, but if one of them *did*
    have a few and happened to fly over, say, a Shriners convention
    while carrying a full load of trout, the temptation to let those
    babies go would be irresistable.  To us, anyway.

        What is especially alarming is that this is not the first time
    that government agencies have dropped potentially lethal creatures
    from planes.  An even scarier example is discussed  in an article
    in the October 1990 issue of Air force magazine, which was alertly
    sent to us by John Breen.   The article, by C.V. Glines, is
    entitled "The Bat Bombers,"  and we urge you to read the whole
    thing yourself, because otherwise you are not going to believe us.  

        In brief, here's what the article says:

        In December 1941, shortly after Pearl Harbor, a Pennsylvania
    dental surgeon named Lytle S. Adams thought of a way that the
    United States could fight back against Japan.  It will come as no
    surprise to anyone who has undergone dental surgery that the idea
    he came up with was: attaching incendiary bombs to bats and
    dropping then out of airplanes.  The idea was that the bats would
    fly into enemy buildings, and the bombs would go off and start
    fires, and Japan would surrender.

        So Dr. Adams sent his idea to the White House, which laughed
    so hard that it got a stomachache.

        No!  That's what you'd *expect* to happen, but instead the
    White House sent the idea to the US Army, which, being the US
    Army, launched a nationwide research effort to determine the best
    kind of bat to attach a bomb to.  By 1943, the research team had
    decided on the free-tailed bat, which "could fly fairly well with
    a one-ounce bomb."  Thousand of these bats were collected and -
    remember, we are not making any of this up - placed in ice-cube
    trays, which were then refrigerated to force the bats to hibernate
    so bombs could be attached to them.  On May 23, 1943, a day the
    every school child should be forced to memorize, five groups of
    test bats, equipped with dummy bombs, were dropped from a B-25
    bomber flying at 5,000 feet.  Here, in the dramatic words of the
    article, is what happened next:

        "Most of the bats, not fully recovered from hibernation, did
    not fly and died on impact."

        Researchers continued to have problems with bats failing to
    show the "can-do" attitude you want in your night-flying combat
    mammal.  Also, there was an incident wherein "some bats escaped
    with live incendiaries aboard and set fire to a hangar and a
    general's car."

        At this point the Army, possibly sensing that the project was
    a disaster, turned it over to the Navy.  Really.  "In October
    1943, the Navy leased four caves in Texas and assigned Marines to
    guard them,"  states the article.  The last thing you want, in
    wartime, is for enemy agents to get hold of your bats.

        The bat project was finally canceled in 1944, having cost
    around $2 million, which is a bargain when you consider what we
    pay for entertainment today.

        But our point is, the government has a track record for
    dropping animals out of airplanes, and there is no reason to
    believe that this has stopped.  Once the government gets hold of a
    truly bad idea, it tends to cling ot it.  For all we know, the
    Defense Department is testing bigger animals, capable of carrying
    heavier payloads.  We could have a situation where, because of an
    unexpected wind shift, thousands of semifrozen, parachute-wearing
    musk oxen come drifting down into a major population center and
    start lumbering confusedly around with high explosives on their
    backs.  We definitely should have some kind of contingency plan for
    stopping them.  Our best weapon is probably trout.

    that was classic db!  thanks 

    Catch and release at it's finest! I wonder what the survival
    rate is for a fish dropped from 150 ft with a forward velocity
    of around a hundred mph ?  :-)
    
    Marty

 I think they only drop them from about 20 feet.

re: I think they only drop them from about 20 feet.

Yeah, but the forward momentum of at least 70-80+ mph (stall speed) would rip 
the scales of the trout.

Pilot: "Geez, ya see that rainbow.  It skipped SEVENTEEN TIMES!"

-HSJ-

>Yeah, but the forward momentum of at least 70-80+ mph (stall speed) would rip 
>the scales of the trout.

 They got this nifty newfangled contraption called a helicopter... :-)

	Dropping fish from airplanes is not new. I remember seeing a 
documentary on TV at least 20 yrs ago. I don't remember the details but 
the fish were dropped from a plane at low altitude. The survival rates 
were considered acceptable. I suppose if you consider that this means is
more likely used for stocking remote lakes it could be that a short flight
with an abrupt landing is still better than many hours in the hatchery 
truck over logging roads or worse. 

	BTW - The story was great...very well done.

    
    The picture that went with the story was also a gas.."Trout Bomber"...
    
    Problem is, in MAine..they frequently drop em into the wrong pond..;*).
    
    E