HOW do you define a fishing grub or dog behaviour? Well I have quite a few definitions for grubs who invade our sport and I’m going to let fly this month so be warned. All sports and professions have low life participants unfortunately. In professional sport they’re cheats who break the rules to win or those who try and injure another player out of spite or bad sportsmanship. There aren’t a lot of rules in fishing unless you fish competitions but there are moral and decency rules that should be followed. Just on the subject of competitions before I move on.
There’s a reason I’m not a member of any fishing club and why I don’t fish competitions where prizes or money are on offer. I’ve witnessed quite a few cases of cheating in ANSA and GFAA competitions over the years with lies told and line classes altered all in the name of winning a new fishing reel or television, etc. It’s a sad reflection on our society these days that as soon as prizes or cash are on offer, the temptation to lie and cheat come to the front and morals go out the window in a few.
Cheating in fishing competitions isn’t the only form of grub behaviour in our sport. There are
quite a few so let’s list them and I’ll vent my anger. The first and most obvious is grubs who litter and leave discarded fishing gear or food where they’ve fished. I do a fair bit of land based fishing and unless I’m fishing a very remote location you can just about put money on some grub having been there and left unwanted hook packets, bait wrappers, line or drink bottles and cans behind because they were too lazy to carry them out. I’ve seen, on quite a few occasions, where people have cleaned fish on the rocks and left scales, gut and fish frames to rot in the sun rather than wash them into the sea.
That makes my blood boil. If I see anyone leave a location and not pick up their rubbish I’ll chip them about it in no uncertain terms. Leaving rubbish on rocks, beaches or any shore based location is the height of grub behaviour. It’s a dead giveaway that fishermen are the culprits which gives our sport a bad name. Leaving discarded fishing line is worse still because birds can easily become entangled and suffer a slow and painful death.
Next in line? How about grubs who kill fish for no reason? I’m talking about people who catch an unwanted species and take great delight in killing it in the belief they are ridding the world of a pest. I’ve seen rock kale, rock cod, wirrahs, maidows, green eels, sergeant baker and small sharks killed in their hundreds over the years by so called fishermen just because they were of no use to them. As far as they are concerned if you can’t eat it or use it for bait, it’s an unwanted pest and deserves to be eradicated. No self-respectingangler has the right to decide if any species is worthless.
If that’s your outlook on our sport you deserve to be shamed and shown the error of your ways. The same goes for keeping under sized fish or exceeding your bag limits. After years of witnessing this type of behaviour I’m to the stage where I speak up and have a go at grubs who do any of this. My son in law recently had a stand up barney with several immigrants who kept undersized fish. He made them return the fish to the water and collect all the rubbish they intended to leave on the rock platform.
Next on my list is social media grubs. Unfortunately, social media is a place for grubs to anonymously post garbage or sit back and troll the anglers amongst us. I’ve had the odd hater have a go at me but I must admit to speaking my mind on the odd occasion where I see disrespectful behaviour that gives our sport a bad reputation.
A case to point recently was some grub who thought it was funny to tilt an outboard motor up, put it in gear at high revs and drop a fish into the spinning prop blades. I saw red when I saw that and reported it to Instagram. What saddened me was seeing how many people liked it and thought it was funny. Some even commented telling this grub what a mad dog he was and to post more of it. That is a very poor reflection of how some so called fishermen think and behave. Gladly they are in the minority.
Just to finish I’ll offer a quick rundown on how the group I fish with behave. We never leave rubbish at a land based location and often pick up other people’s crap and carry it out when we leave. We only take enough fish for our immediate needs and strictly adhere to size and bag limits. Any unwanted bi-catch is safely released and respected.
We never clean fish and leave scales, gut or fish frames on the rocks. We are very mindful of how we dispose of unwanted fishing line and particularly braid. A hundred metres of that stuff in a bunch of grapes is a death sentence to any bird or small animal that comes into contact with it. That also applies if you put it in the bin and it goes into landfill. Wrap it up and burn it or cut it into 15cm lengths.
Doing the right thing on our waterways and in our sport isn’t hard if you have morals, self- respect and decency. It’s the ignorant grubs in our sport that give it a bad name and sadly, many of them couldn’t care less. They have no respect or decency in anything they do in life but they’d be the first to complain if a location was closed due to the high volume of rubbish left there by fishermen.
