Who Owns the Fish?
Flyfishing Stories by Bob Lawless

This seems like a simple question that deserves only a simple answer. Whoever catches the fish owns it, stupid. Well, let's give this a little more thought than that. Maybe a little episode that happened to me will be useful to illustrate what I mean, i.e. the answer is somewhat complex.

I was on Oregon's Chetco River one Thanksgiving a few years ago where low water had all the salmon, mostly Kings in the 30 pound range, stacked in a pool above the hole known as "Social Security." Only old farts, like me, get to fish that hole. But I was thirty-five then and forced to fish just above it.

This spot was dynamite!. Chocked full of big fish and, of course, shoulder to shoulder fishermen. I had a fly rod but chose to leave it in the truck because of all the fishermen and gear is so much easier to control. If you see some jerk is going to foul your line, it is much easier to get out of the way with gear than it is with a long fly line drifting over everyone's stuff.

So I walk up to the crowd and shout out, "Hi, everybody. I hope you are all doing well and I hope I might be allowed to join you." There were a few mumbles and grumbles, but nothing to my face. I was a big bozo then and so I had a certain amount of balls to be so out front with them. Anyway I started to muscle in where I thought the resistance might be the least. And I got a spot. Whoosh, and I send my spin and glow right over against this rock wall and I get a viscous strike and holler out, "Fish on!!" They all got out of my way as the salmon made a heated run straight downstream where I found a quiet spot to wear him out. I am almost certain that I snagged that fish even though the hooks were in his mouth. Salmon swim with their mouths open and this is thus the place where they are most likely to be foul hooked. Long story short, I slipped the lure out of the salmon's mouth (he looked to be about 14 lbs or so) and he beat it in a blink of the old eye. There was a gasp from the crowd as catch and release was unknown then.

An old hag approached me and demanded why I had released the fish, that there were hungry people in this town (Brookings, OR) and that if I didn't give a damn about keeping or eating fish that they did, and why had I not offered it to someone seeing as how they had given me a place to fish. I told her that the limit was only two fish and that I wanted two thirty pounders. She said she understood but why throw away the small fish. I said again that the limit is two and if I kept the fish, I could only have one big one. She said,"Aw, shit, no one cares about those things. You could of given me the fish and then caught two more. No one will say anything. You don't hafta worry 'bout that." I told her, somewhat righteously, that I don't break the law. She spat and then walked away mad. There was more rumbling and grumbling from the mob.

I mean, here it is, my fish and my fish to do with whatever I please . But she implied that the fish really belonged to the hungry and I had no right to throw their fish away. I thought about it for some time. I could have fed some people but because I was a greedy little bastard who wanted to take home 120 pounds of salmon ( and that's exactly what I did over the next few days, taking my possession limit of four kings @ thirty pounds or so each) and so I didn't want the little guy to spoil my haul.

In sum, there is a suggestion in all of this that those people who need the fish the most should get them. But no, the greedy guy grabs off a pile of fish so big that he didn't have enough neighbors to give them all away and they wound up in the garbage. Maybe such an idiot as this had no right to the fish either.

Some might argue that since almost all wild stocks are now gone, fish and game people own them and they probably think that they do. They don't want the fish. They want the money that the fish bring in the form of license fees which keep their checks coming and keeps the wolves from the door.

Speaking of wolves, maybe jackals would be a better word, they think they own the fish. These wolves are the wild people who live amongst us, the poor white trash, those who fight for every scrap available. They have teeth missing which talks about how hard they have fought. They are a crafty folk, very ingenious actually, uneducated and haters of the educated, they think every thing belongs to them that is part of their country, the game, the fish, the mushrooms and whatever else they can find. No government, no fish and game, no biologist, no environmentalist will ever tell them otherwise. They are true hunter-gatherers, much like our ancient ancestors were. And if they can fill a thirty-two gallon garbage can with salmon that they have speared with the help even of their children (I have personally seen this happen, dad had the spear, the son held the trash can), then so be it because those fish belong to them because of birthright. They are Americans and American fish are their fish.

Then there are the PETA people who would argue that no one owns the fish. The fish own the fish. Leave them alone. Let them be. Stop the killing. Kill the killers. And other simplistic thoughts too shallow to even mention.

The commercial boys feel that they own all the fish. It is for them after all that hatcheries hatch fish and a few extra steelhead to keep the license money coming in from the sports whom they regard as a joke - dumb little bastards who hang out around the sea buoy when the ocean is flat and catch a few miserable fish. It's the commercial fleet that brings in the mega bucks for the state. They feed the people in Kansas City. They run the sea ports. Those salmon are food fish, not sport fish. When the sports get them in the rivers, the fish are black and of poor quality. Caught in the ocean, the whole world dotes on them. They are God's gift to man and that's why they are so delicious. The fishing fleet owns the fish. Plain and simple.

But I have another thought. It is mother who owns them. Mother river I am speaking of here. It is the river that produces the gravel which accepts and shelters the spawn of the parents who go off and die without a thought of the future of the eggs. It is mother river who provides the food for the smolts. It is she who washes them out to sea to grow large and to return again to her waiting arms. Without mother river there would be no fish for anyone to claim. And so I have pledged to myself to explore and to promote the importance of the water itself as something that no one should own but something that everyone should respect and nurture.
I could do worse.