I personally never have had a run-in with a game warden, but then, I’ve always made a concerted effort to abide by all the rules, as I understand them. Even going back to my Navy days, when I would head home to Kansas for a few days of fishing with my dad, I always would contact the law there ahead of time to make sure their rules hadn’t changed. As it worked out, Kansas never required a visiting active-duty military person with an ID card to have a fishing license during my 20-year career.
My many years in Northern Virginia and locally have been
equally without any problems, too. Have been stopped on the water a number of
times for a check of my license (have had a lifetime license for years now) and to see whether I had the appropriate gear
in my boat, but those instances always have gone smoothly.
Unfortunately, though, the same can’t be said of other folks, as the following two examples will demonstrate.
In a nutshell, he got his butt handed to him by Mother Nature. Strong winds blew him and his aluminum Basstracker 175 onto every stump in the lake..."just a misterable outing," to use his own words.
Finally, after dusting off his ego and rubbing his bruises, he headed into the landing, where he knew game wardens nearly always were on duty...and this day proved to be no exception. The younger of the two wardens didn't even wait for him to finish strapping down his boat before he started asking if he had caught anything.
The disgruntled angler just had given the young warden an emphatic NO! when the latter asked to check the boat's livewell.
"Knock yourself out!" came another terse reply from the angler.
Because the carpeting made for a tight-fitting lid, the young warden couldn't open it from the ground, so he hopped up in the boat, only to learn that the angler's warning that he "might still pop a hernia trying to open it" indeed was true. However, he succeeded but not before making a smart arse comment about the angler being right.
Then the unexpected happened. Seems the young warden had decided to depart the boat on the same side where all the angler's fishing rods were strapped down, and as he jumped off, a spinnerbait caught him in the mid-calf. He now had one leg on the ground, and the other in mid-air, hollering for the angler to push the release button on the strap so he could extricate his leg and remove the hook hanging from it.
The angler obliged but then had to stand around and wait for the young warden to check for a fire extinguisher, all the correct flotation devices...in short, everything on his long list of regulated equipment. The angler fully expected to be handed a ticket for something before all was said and done but escaped without one.
While passing the two game wardens on his way out, the angler couldn't resist stopping momentarily and hollering, "I caught a big one today!"
The other account I read about came from a story by Scott Lindsey that once appeared in the Panama City News Herald. Lindsey based his story on a book titled "Backcountry Lawman," written by Bob H. Lee, a retired Florida wildlife officer living in Putnam County. He was a game warden from 1997 until his retirement in 2007.
According to Lindsey, "You got the feeling you were sitting beside Lee in his old-timer 18-foot fiberglass patrol boat...the kind that had a high bow and low gunnels. It was fashioned after a wooden boat of the same proportions used commercially to hoop-net fish."
Lindsey noted that he got to see one of those boats on the Brothers River in the 1970s. He was bass fishing at the time with a guy named Popeye Fields.
Said Lindsey, "We were about to return to Howard Creek and go home when I heard the whine of a big motor coming up the river. My registration had run out (or so he thought), and I told Popeye I was going to try something and to hold on. I flipped the yellow sally (a fishing fly) about 30 feet out into the woods and then turned the bow toward the bank, got out, and pulled the bow as far as I could onto it.
"Sure enough," continued Lindsey, "the approaching boat slowed when it got even with us, and an officer pulled up alongside my boat and waited until I had retrieved my lure. As soon as I got back in the boat, he wanted to see our fishing licenses. We showed them to him, and at the same time, I held his boat as tightly against mine as I could, thinking he never would see my expired tag.
"The officer had a big black Labrador retriever riding with him in the bow. I felt pretty smug as he backed away from my boat, thinking I had gotten away with something. The officer looked back over his shoulder, though, and said, 'You better get that registration renewed because it goes out in two days.'
"I could have fainted," said Lindsey. "How he even saw that tag I'll never know, but I thought it had expired the week before. I learned not to fool with these boys; they know their stuff."
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