Volume 1 number 1, January 1999 Anglers Rule When is the last time you had a fish worthy of an official measurement? At Paxon Lake a friend of mine managed to pull a twelve-pound burbot out of a hole I had recently vacated, and of course, I was really happy for him. Yeah, right. I got my revenge through a process called the Alaska Trophy Fish Program. The state of Alaska recognizes any burbot over eight pounds as a trophy class catch, and all you gotta do to join the fun is fill out the papers, take a picture, and have the fish weighed on an official scale. Ha! What do you mean, you don’t understand? O.K., I’ll explain something about fishing that most anglers learn the hard way. It will also explain why, while there are lots of brands of fish scales available on the market, you don’t ever see anglers with them in their tackle boxes. They aren’t expensive, they don’t take up much room, so why is it that the inventor of what should have been a sure-fire millionaire-maker is currently sitting on the streets in some suburban city next to a pile of rusty rods, with a can rattling and asking for spare change to buy worms with? A few years back, a friend of mine caught a nine-pound burbot, which qualified as a trophy fish, but when presented with the possibility of registering it he declined, while a wise smile spread across his face. The cause for the smile was obvious to me, but may confuse some less experienced anglers. You see, the burbot that was then nine pounds is now pushing an honest eleven in tales related to the incident, and the best part is that the only way to dispute weight of the fish would be to interrogate the only witness—me, and I’m certainly not going to roll over on the man who backs up my twenty-pound lake trout! (No, my lake trout isn’t registered either.) So you see, while one angler’s burbot will always be a trophy of twelve pounds, another angler’s fish will, after the proper amount of time, become a legend of monstrous proportions, very likely to outweigh the registered one in a minimum of five years. Now you can see how my revenge will come together: by stategically catching another burbot with a different buddy and patiently passing my minimum time limit, I finally regain bragging rights. Or I could just catch a record-size fish and register it with the state… | ||
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