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"Don't shoot till you see the whites of their gills"

By Ed Shamy
Free Press Staff Writer

May 25, 2006
Today is the last day of the season to participate in one of the many events that make Vermont so special.

Grab some ammo and a rifle, shotgun or pistol, get yourself out to Lake Champlain and shoot some fish!

Yes, sports fans, today is the final day of the 2006 fish hunting season in Vermont, the only state in the nation that still allows the pastime. Louisiana might claim to be the sportsman's paradise, but Vermont walks the walk by allowing licensed hunters to fire into open water from March 25 through May 25.

In the sanitized vernacular of hunting, you can "harvest" Vermont carp, suckers, bowfins, mullet, gar, bullhead or shad with a firearm, although the most highly sought quarries are northern pike and chain pickerel. Fish shooting is allowed only in Lake Champlain. Shoot a fish in Carmi or Bomoseen and you're headed for the big house.

The thought of opening fire on fish makes some people -- including many who earn their livings setting policy for our own Fish and Wildlife Department -- cringe. Shooting fish seems somehow barbaric, although mostly because we don't do it in large enough numbers. Shooting anything that can't return fire is a lopsided affair.

John Roy is a farmer in South Hero and a member of the state's Fish and Wildlife Board. He's the unofficial spokesman for pike shooting. He remembers as if it were yesterday the pitched 1987 battle to outlaw the ban, and he still keeps a stack of yellowing newspaper clips from all over creation that reported on Vermont's oddball sport.

Roy grew up on the land he still farms. At 66, he doesn't shoot fish much anymore because it requires a fair amount of tree climbing or dead-of-night canoe paddling, neither of which has as much appeal to a 66-year-old man as it does to a youngster.

He opposes the occasional effort to do away with fish-shooting, not on the grounds that it's wise or ethical, but because of its tradition.

"I guess if I grew up around a mountain stream or a river, I might have got into fly fishing," he said. "But I didn't."

He grew up across from a shallow, marshy pocket of Lake Champlain. His father and his father's father shot pike -- not because they were brutes but because they were responsible for feeding families.

They'd climb a tree at the time of year that snowmelt bloated the lake and the pike came into the shallows to spawn. The perfect shot would send a bullet just beneath a fish in a couple of feet of water. The concussion would either stun the fish or kill it outright.

"I saw plenty of fish shake it off and swim away by the time you could climb down out of the tree," Roy said.

Actually striking the fish with the bullet is a bad idea as it turns a pike into waterborne Spam -- without the can to contain it.

By the time he was a young man, "it sounded like Vietnam out there" on the lakeshore. Hunters by the score shot into the water.

No such scene exists today. There's no need to outlaw fish-shooting, Roy contends. It's dying on its own.

Kids these days aren't like kids of yesteryear. They just don't want to shoot fish anymore.

A prohibition on fish shooting would require a change in state law that would have to pass through the House of Representatives, the Senate and the governor.

Keep that in mind in this, an election year.

Enough about taxes and health care, Senator. Where do you stand on fish-shooting?

There's a question guaranteed to enliven any debate.

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/a...605250301/1007