JerseyDog

First day out on the water. I'm guessing defect of some kind. Get a lawyer. Or you turned off the master power which turned off the automatic bilge. That would be a bad idea.

Horrific.

Two years in jail is asinine. Maybe a month. Maybe a week. Enough to shame him into never doing anything stupid like that again. Two years in jail means he loses his job, maybe his house, his family suffers. A little excessive for an $800 scam.

My two cents - pick up some extra hours at work and get a pro to do it. Its messy, sanding can be a challenge for a newbie and it will take longer than you think which is no fun with your house torn apart.

I never go out to catch & release. I go out to catch the perfect fish for a nice meal. Sometimes I catch the perfect fish and I like him so much I let him go. Sometimes I keep him. That being said, I release 95% of the fish I catch.

A few more things: EXERCISE - If you are worried about exercise - a beagle might not be the right animal for you. They are high strung and love time in the field. They are not like bigger dogs that are content to have a small run and then just hang out. They need lots and lots of exercise or they get depressed and balloon into big fat loafs. I taught my young one how to fetch. That saves me a lot of trouble but I think he might be a special case, since I don't think they are known as retrievers. He will also dock dive and swim like a retriever which I believe is also pretty rare. HOWLING - I've found my dogs are very quiet 95% of the time. They do not howl randomly - they howl when there is a reason to (squirrels, raccoons, rabbits, etc.). However when they do howl, you know it. They are LOUD and they won't stop until they get what they want. TRAINING - They can be trained to do certain things. They can be trained with food. But with exceptions they will never win obedience records. At my dog training class, our beagle was the star when we were training with food. Other animals would get distracted but he always stayed focussed on the task at hand if it involved food. Once the food was taken away, he might as well have gone deaf. And you can’t fake it, he can tell from 50’ if you have a snack in your hang or you are just faking. No snack, no obedience. FOOD – They are food dogs of the highest degree. They will steal from the table, the garbage, anywhere. They will jump onto the dining room table if you don’t watch them. I've lost a few steaks that way. They dial right into food they want even if they cannot see it and then wait "sleeping quietly" until you are not paying attention then before you know it, it’s gone. PHYSICAL DISCIPLINE - They don’t care about being wacked, spanked or slapped. They appear to feel no pain. Hitting them will not change their behaviour. They are not like some dogs where a slap on the rump is enough to bring them back in line. They just don't seem to care. When you see how hard they smash themselves around in the field all on their own, you’ll understand why this method of discipline doesn’t really work. INTELLIGENCE - they are super smart, but people think they are dumb because they don't sit and stay and come when called like a retriever or a shepherd. They however will come up with new and creative strategies to get what they want - some of which will amaze you in their ingenuity. Beagles are not house pets, they are not small dogs. They are compact medium size hunting dogs with a ton of energy, brains and spirit. I am crazy about my hounds, they are warm and friendly and lots of fun, but they are challenging.

The guy at BPS recommended that I buy the right hand retrieve. He said a lot of folks cast with their right hand, switch hands after the cast and then retrieve. So I tried that and I hated it. So i returned it and bought a left hand retrieve and that has worked great for me. I found it most natural to cast with my right and retreive with my left just like my spinning rig.

The world is a pretty strange and random place. Sometimes the safest people get shot hunting, or get killed in a car wreck or fall out of a boat and drown. Shame though. I'm sure neither of them wanted this to happen and the guy doing the shooting is probably devastated.

Just thinking - let my last post also serve as a warning about the "joys" of beagle ownership.

There was a guy between Oshawa and Port Perry that bred beagles. Advertises in the Star (or he did at the time). I got my hound from him about 10 years ago and while he's never going to win any dog shows, if I did hunt him, he'd be a SUPERSTAR. Killer stamina. Has lots of fun in the field, loves to chase. He over 10 now and its still a challenge just keeping him exercised. In his heyday, he could do eight or more good hours of running, swimming and fetch with no problem. We would force him inside for worries that his heart would give out.

Since you mentioned it, I believe full on vegans - no meat, no animal by-products, not leather, etc. are the ONLY people on the planet that can comment on hunting and fishing. The are welcome to their opinions and I'm welcome to ignore them. The people that make me nuts are the ones that eat chicken & fish, etc. but take some kind of offense when someone wants to go and get their own. Just because you didn't kill the chicken personally does not make you morally superior to the ones that do. In fact, in many cases it might be quite the opposite. And P3TA, love them or hate them, have had some successes in industries that are outright and unecessarily cruel to animals which can't be a totally bad thing. Oh, and sorry for hijacking the thread.

I read the fishinghurts website a while back. Interesting perspective. Apparently bass are so smart, I'm kinda getting worried I might be competing with smallmouth in the job market sometime soon. Apparently they will work for a lot cheaper than a human and office space under water is a lot cheaper for companies.

You might be the first person to ever suggest actually going TO Oklahoma. If you want to whet your teeth on gar, you should start with GBay. There is schools of four footers there and I don't think they could bite your entire hand off. They are however very hard to catch. I've bonked tons of them on the head with every lure & bait imaginable and only ever got one up to the boat and that was a fluke with a worm and a hook (and he spit the hook as soon as he was boatside which honestly, was fine by me).

Wow - that was a great summary and analysis. Ultimately most sportsmen follow the regulations out of an interest in conservation and not out of fear of getting caught and more enforcement in a province as large as Ontario would likely not even be noticed by most folks. It’s like speeding on a 400 highway - unlike in many US states where they are far more aggressive, the intention is not to ticket everyone going 10 over but to ensure people stick within reasonable limits. The truly bad drivers always tend to stick out and end up with a handful of tickets more often than not. As far as I can tell this is pretty well the same for sportsmen. The really bad apples tend to get themselves into trouble at some point or another. Another worry would be setting fine targets that a CO would need to deliver. This would make them more aggressive in enforcing questionable regulation breaches when now they use their discretion as to whether a fine is the best solution. As an example, last year we had a license check and two of my buddies left theirs at the cottage. We were the only boat on the bay and the cottage was maybe 1km away. The CO managed to find them on the computer and let us off with a nice lecture about getting our act together which was a totally reasonable solution. He stated quite specifically he didn't want to give anglers who had done nothing else wrong and who actually had bought and paid for their licenses a hard time and some pretty big fines for simply forgetting them back at camp. With a more aggressive enforcement model he would have been basically forced to ticket my pals and that would have been a loser for all involved. It a tough situation and I think the MNR really could use more funding but I worry that turning regulation enforcement into a revenue generation scheme would make it worse for all involved and my bet is, the government would just end up taking that money to fritter away on other nonsense no one wants or needs.

Has anyone read what the Cormorant Defenders have to say? Why are these Defenders and anglers so far apart on the issue? Do they hurt fisheries or not? Do they kill trees or not? Are they native or not? Do they in fact eat alewife and goby and isn't that good? Are the populations growing or declining? Does anyone really know? I am all for having lots of fish to catch, but sometimes its hard to know what to believe when an issue becomes so polarized. I have seen some of the damage they do and I will strongly and perhaps violently encourage any one that comes near my land to move on - but is this just the normal way of being for a billion years or if so and should we be meddling with Mother Nature? I can totally understand a government deciding to leave a native population alone and let nature take its course. It is a pretty easy decision if only to avoid messy front page pictures in The Star with "gun nuts" and other serial killer types with gun in hand smiling like its Xmas morning while they blast the proud and wonderful cormorant to hell and beyond. I sure won't be voting for them, but with an election around the corner I can understand why they made the decision they did – I might very well do the same thing in that position for no better reason than to make sure I got my six years in office (and the fat pension that goes with it). http://www.zoocheck.com/cormorant/

Further to the comment above about a small fee for testing - anytime the government charges you $50 for something it costs them about $2,000 to deliver the service. Keep in mind, something like this little test that seems so simple is far from it. There is senior level bureaucrats, union support staff, high paid consultants, flashy ministry offices and a little skim off the top to feed random slush funds to pay for things like flags and parades and swimming pools and charter jets and weekend retreats on Caribbean cruise ships and lord only knows what else. Never forget the two billion the feds blew on a firearms database program that a high school kid could cobble together with MS Office in his spare time for minimum wage. Personally I'd rather the poachers scam a few extra meals than get the government's fingers into another slice of the pie.

The biggest threat to our fisheries is habitat destruction, pollution, invasive species and to some extent commercial fisheries. While overfishing by recreational anglers can have a negative impact in a specific geographic area most fish populations do and will rebound over time if their habitat is not spoiled by other factors. Keep in mind a single fish may lay thousands of eggs however environmental factors dictate to what extent those eggs become a viable, mature, reproducing fish. While I don't agree with poaching I think the few people who take too many fish are not really the problem. And I am pretty sure most folks who are 30 walleye overlimit know exactly what they are doing and no test is likely to change their behavior.

Thanks. That was dynamite.

Yes there is. Me and a million others saw a nice big article on that topic this past weekend in the Toronto Star.

Remember as well, you can and should ALWAYS negotiate on a high ticket item like a car or boat. I bet you can grind almost $1,500 off that Lowe package without too much trouble. Also, with something like a boat that you could possibly keep for 10-20 years, the extra few bucks now to get exactly what you want will pay huge dividends in the long run.

I caught an 18" largie last summer in the lilies of some swampy, hot backwater on GBay. The fish was bleeding really badly, so I kept it for dinner. I soaked the filets for an hour in cool water, coated it in fish crisp and fried it up in butter. Tasted great! Go figure.

I always find it a little strange that people will tend toward an opinion based on what may be in their best interests regardless of the facts. As an example P3TA would like to prove fish feel pain and anglers would like to deny it - both in order to support their own personal agendas. The way I figure it, they probably do feel pain of some sort, some more than other and some in different ways than others - but either way I accept that as an unfortunate part of the blood sport that is fishing. And while I am not prepared to stop angling I have taken steps to minimize the stress on any fish I catch - with barbless hooks, careful C&R techniques and when a keeper, as speedy dispatch with my knife.

OK - I have a beagle in a canoe story. A few years ago when my beagle was about two - well he was a pretty rowdy dog (in fact he still is, but nothing like when he was young). Anyway, a buddy and I get the bright idea to bring the dog along in the canoe for an afternoon of fishing which turns out to be less than a good idea. First off, he cannot settle down. He's a beagle, so really can't ever settle down, but its worse in the canoe. Then he gets the idea it would be fun to climb up onto the bow of the boat. Well its pretty tippy and into the drink he goes. We haul him back up in the boat and now he's soaked and getting everything wet. But the fun is nowhere near over. He then decides he wants to swim over to the land (about 150 meters), so he climbs back up onto the bow of the boat and jumps in and starts swimming toward the land. So we paddle over and haul him out and back into the boat. This happens a few more times before we get wise that he's not going to settle so we tie him to the thwartl. Well that works a little except he's gulped up so much water he starts taking a leak all over the bottom of the boat. Not once, not twice, but a ton of times. Before we know it the bottom of the boat and all our gear is sloshing around in piss and water and we pretty well had to call it a day. Needless to say that was the first time and last time he ever went in a canoe and/or ever came fishing with me. Never once did I worry he could tip the boat but he was one huge PIA and if your beagle is anything like the rest of them, you might wanna wait until he's about 15 before you think about taking him fishing.

That's not really a new idea... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6Op3OPItH0

Yup - pull it all the way forward and lower it back down. You have two or three notches of trim which click in going back up. got two of them, so a real intimate relationship with those motors.