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November 10, 2009 by
Investigators in Ohio believe rising unemployment and a tough economy is driving some ginseng diggers in the state to illegally harvest the root on private land and out of season.
For the past month, State Wildlife Officers from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) Division of Wildlife have been contacting many Ohio ginseng dealers and diggers as part of an ongoing investigation.
To date, Ohio wildlife officers have identified more than 30 individuals and 60 violations of Ohio law relating to ginseng root harvesting. As the investigation continues, authorities say formal charges will likely include digging ginseng without landowner permission, collecting or possession of ginseng during the closed season, failure to maintain accurate records and failure to certify ginseng prior to export.
The perennial herb is one of the most sought-after medicinal plants in the world. American ginseng occurs from Quebec, Canada, west to Minnesota and south to Georgia and Oklahoma.
Ohio certifies about 3,000 pounds of ginseng for export annually. There are 46 licensed ginseng dealers in the state with an estimated two to four thousand diggers. The number of diggers/harvesters varies annually depending on market conditions.
Last year, 3,626 pounds of ginseng were legally harvested in Ohio and sold to dealers at around $400 a pound. The value of the dried wild root fluctuates, and was as high as $1,000 per pound in 2007.
[ Read Full Post ] October 22, 2009 by
The Martha’s Vineyard (Mass.) Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby committee voted last week to disqualify the heaviest bluefish entered in its competition after it was found to contain ice cubes weighing 1.8 ounces in its stomach.
The Fish, caught by Stephen Pietruska of West Tisbury, weighed 13.86 pounds, exceeding the leading boat bluefish by .05 pounds.
The annual Derby awards prizes in both shore and boat divisions for bluefish, striped bass, false albacore and bonito. The top prize in the boat division is a new truck.
The ice cubes were discovered when Pietruska’s fish was cut open and examined—a standard Derby procedure when a fish becomes a new category leader.
Pietruska said he did not know how the ice got into the fish’s stomach, but suspected it occurred because he forced the fish with its mouth open into a cooler filled with ice.
The Martha’s Vineyard Times reported that no further action would be taken by the Derby Committee, according to its official statement on the case.
“Although the angler’s intent may have been to protect the freshness of his fish for the filet program and to reduce the loss of weight of his fish from catch to weigh-in, it is the responsibility of the angler to bring a fish to the Derby scale without any ice that may add additional weight to his catch.
“There was insufficient evidence to prove intent to deliberately increase the weight of the fish, so no further action is to be taken,” read the official committee statement.
[ Read Full Post ]October 21, 2009 by
For the rest of his life, Caden Smith will probably relish the time he caught a catfish weighing more than himself—a feat he will quite likely never surpass. That’s because last weekend Caden, a 40-pound 4-year-old, caught and released a 45-pound flathead catfish from Texas’ Trinity River.
Caden was fishing with his family near his home in Joshua, Texas when he hooked the fish of his short lifetime.
“He battled for his life,” his uncle Dan Smith told the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram.
Proud mom Natalie said the fish was as big as her son.
“When they got it out, he hugged it,” she said.
Though not a record breaker—a 56-pounder caught in the Trinity in 2004 holds that distinction for a junior angler—it is an impressive feat nonetheless.
Per the wishes of the newly seasoned angler, the bottom-feeding behemoth was released, to fight again.
[ Read Full Post ] October 17, 2009 by
Probably no genre of angler is more obsessed with casting accuracy and prowess than fly fishermen.
And, when it comes to fly casting, there’s not a book and movie combination that brought more interest and excitement to the sport than the 1976 memoir “A River Runs Through It,” by Norman Maclean, and the subsequent 1992 film featuring emerging (at that time) mega-star Brad Pitt.
On Sunday, a monument honoring the central character in the story, minister and fly fisherman John Maclean, was dedicated at the First Presbyterian Church on Fifth St. in Missoula, Montana. It was in this Western city that Maclean presented his first sermon as pastor of the congregation one hundred years ago this year, in February 1909. He planned and oversaw the building of the current house of worship, which was completed in 1915.
Rev. Maclean, his wife Clara, and son Paul—around whose 1938 murder the book’s plot is constructed—are all buried in the church cemetery.
Fly-fishing notwithstanding, it could be said that casting is equally important in movies. As proof of this premise, The Newshound offers the photographs of Rev. Maclean and actor Tom Skerritt, as the latter depicted the fly-fishing pastor in the film. Pretty incredible similarity, wouldn’t you agree?
If you only saw the movie and neglected to read Maclean’s magnificent book, you missed some classic and inspiring fishing lines (pun intended). Among them:
“Poets talk about ‘spots of time,’ but it is really the fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone. I shall remember that son of a bitch forever.”
“He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume...that all great fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fisherman and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.”
“Eventually all things merge into one and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.”
[ Read Full Post ] August 26, 2009 by
In the late summer months, it’s not unusual when motoring along the banks of Lake Erie in northern Ohio to have some pretty substantial flying objects go splat! on your windshield: like junebugs, dragonflies and the occasional hard-hitting bumblebee.
An 8-pound fish, though? Well, that’s somewhat unusual.
Messy, too.
Leighann Niles and her 5-year-old daughter were traveling on the main road through scenic East Harbor State Park on Monday when they were treated to the sight of a bald eagle flying overhead, a freshly caught fish grasped in its talons.
“I look in the air and see the most beautiful eagle I’d ever seen in my life,” Niles said.
It was about that time that the eagle evidently developed some difficulty with its landing gear, so to speak.
“The next thing I knew, the fish wiggled—it dropped like a brick and completely shattered my windshield,” reported Ms. Niles.
The combined impact of a 40-foot fish freefall and a 2004 Toyota Matrix traveling at 40 miles per hour resulted in one totally ruined windshield.
Neither Niles nor her daughter was injured, but they both have a whopper of a fish story to tell.
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August 20, 2009 by
You may have heard or read about the invasive species of Asian carp that has spread northward, up the Mississippi River and into its tributaries in recent years. Not only does the fish grow quickly and grow large, but it has the unusual propensity for leaping high into the air when rousted by the sound of a passing outboard motor.
Boaters who frequent waters occupied by the exotic species have learned to take special precautions, like wearing protective gear or arming themselves with garbage can lids to use as shields to deflect the airborne bottom-feeders.
Not surprisingly, many hunters, (who are experts at producing lemonade when they are dealt lemons), have succeeded in making the best of the situation. These days, especially along parts of the Illinois River near Peoria, on any summer day you are likely to see numerous boaters armed with bows and arrows, cruising the waters in search of flying carp.
Such was the case earlier this summer, when Jodi Barnes was bowfishing for Illinois River carp with her fiancée, Chris Brackett, whose company, Brackett Outdoors, produces DVDs featuring high-intensity carp-slaying action.
“We were going really slow because that seems to get them to jump really high,” Brackett told my good friend Jeff Lampe, the outdoors editor for the Peoria Journal-Star. “Jodi had shot at one and was leaning forward to reel in her arrow when another fish came out of nowhere to her right and then hit her in the jaw.”
The smackdown was caught with incredible precision by photographer Bill Konway, a passenger in the boat. The resulting impact broke Barnes’ jaw.
Ms. Barnes is currently recovering from her carp-bashing, and her diet will reportedly consist of smoothies and mashed potatoes for the next four weeks.
In the meantime, Beckett is scheduled to take film crews for the National Geographic Channel’s series, “Hooked” in search of slimy, flying target this coming weekend.
Until we hear otherwise, we assume the engagement is still on.
[ Read Full Post ]
June 24, 2009 by
An Internet-savvy U.S. Coast Guardsman’s use of the online social-networking site Facebook this weekend helped locate a fisherman thought to be missing and prevented the launch of a search mission that could have cost taxpayers as much as $30,000.
An angler was presumed overdue early Sunday morning after a ranger at Cobscook Park in Eastport, Maine reported a lone vehicle with an empty trailer parked at a launch-site parking lot. Using the vehicle’s license plate, the Coast Guard’s Northern New England sector office located a name, address and phone number, but attempts to contact the tardy owner were unsuccessful.
Before ordering a full-fledged search involving Coast Guard aircraft and cutter vessels, Paul Conner, the officer in charge of the case, opted to do some online searching via the popular networking site, Facebook. He was able to locate an e-mail address belonging to a relative of the missing man, and subsequently discovered the boater/angler had simply opted to moor overnight at a different location than where his vehicle and trailer were parked.
“Sometimes we have to be very creative in our information gathering,” Connor said later. “A simple Internet search can often help us locate a missing person before a boat or aircraft is even on scene.”
We’re guessing that Conner—and perhaps the entire U.S. Coast Guard—now appear prominently on the fisherman’s Facebook “friends” list.
[ Read Full Post ]April 16, 2009 by
A fascinating new study suggests that some largemouth bass are inherently more susceptible to being caught by anglers that others.
A University of Illinois experiment spanning 20 years has found that a largemouth’s propensity for chasing the offerings of fishermen is passed down from generation to generation of bass.
The findings of the study, “Selection for Vulnerability to Angling in Largemouth Bass” appears in the most recent issue of Transactions of the American Fisheries Society.
A press release from the University of Illinois reports that the study began in 1975 with the resident population of bass in Ridge Lake, an experimental study lake in Fox Ridge State Park in Charleston. Through rigidly controlled fishing, each fish caught was tagged prior to release.
“We kept track over four years of all of the angling that went on, and we have a total record—there were thousands of captures,” said David Philipp, ecology and conservation researcher at U of I. “Many fish were caught more than once. One fish was caught three times in the first two days, and another was caught 16 times in one year.”
In 1979, the lake was completely drained and 1,700 bass were collected.
“Interestingly, about 200 of those fish had never been caught, even though they had been in the lake the entire four years,” Philipp said.
Males and females from the group that had never been caught were designated Low Vulnerability (LV) fish. To produce a line of LV offspring, they were allowed to spawn with each other in university research ponds. Similarly, males and females that had been caught four or more times in the study were designated High Vulnerability (HV) fish and were spawned in different ponds to produce a line of HV offspring.
The two distinct lines were then marked and raised in common ponds until they were big enough to be fished.
“Controlled fishing experiments clearly showed that the HV offspring were more vulnerable to angling than the LV offspring,” said the researcher.
After repeating the selection process multiple times during the course of 20 years, Phillip and his research team found that with each generation the vulnerability difference between the two designated lines grew even more pronounced.
“Most of the selection is occurring on the LV fish—that is, for the most part, the process is making that line of fish less vulnerable to angling. We actually saw only a small increase in angling vulnerability in the HV line,” Philipp said.
[ Read Full Post ]
April 7, 2009 by
There aren’t many movies that depict the finer points of angling, the craft and skill associated with catching fish and the overall pleasure of all things piscatorial.
But leave it to The Newshound to bring Outdoor Life readers the latest in angling entertainment—news about a provocative new fishing movie you’re not going to find playing at your local theatre or Cineplex 4. No sirree! This puppy is destined to make a beeline straight to DVD!
I can't even begin to do justice to the screenplay and plot of “Jaws of the Mississippi,” so here’s the synopsis provided by the movie’s producer, Active Entertainment (based in the American cinematic hotbed of creativity, Lafayette, Louisiana):
A massive hurricane devastates the Gulf of Mexico, with it a US government’s top-secret anti-bioterrorism facility. When one of its highly radioactive chemicals spills into the ocean it triggers mutations in a great white shark, enabling its adaptation to survive in fresh water. As this shark reeks (that’s the producer’s spelling, not mine) havoc on local Mississippi River towns it poses the additional risk of spreading this radioactive material and contaminating the entire freshwater system of the United States. Local fisherman Ward and his hillbilly crew are secretly hired to hunt down this shark, and when they find it threatening a group of teenage boaters, Ward must face his troubled past to save these kids and prevent further catastrophe.
Something tells me the riveting movie dialogue contains a line like: “We’re gonna need a bigger jonboat!”
[ Read Full Post ]April 2, 2009 by
In what authorities are calling a freak accident, a Huntington Beach, Calif. fisherman choked to death on a baitfish while trying to entertain a boatful of school kids on a fishing trip Friday.
The death of Jeff Twaddle, 54, a deckhand on the charter boat Gale Force, was ruled accidental by the county coroner’s office. The official cause of death was “aspiration of fish.”
According to reports, Twaddle was joking with the 20 elementary school children who joined him onboard for an outing that departed from the Rainbow Marina near the Port of Long Beach.
The Orange County Register reports today that the joke quickly turned fatal when Twaddle began choking, lost consciousness, and was unresponsive. Lifeguards attempted to revive the longtime fisherman while en-route to land, where Long Beach paramedics were waiting.
Long Beach fire battalion Chief Frank Hayes said Twaddle was “trying to be lighthearted and make students laugh when he put the fish in his mouth.”
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