Oh, Fer Chrissakes
Take a frickin’ picture, jackass.
Adlee Bruner’s fishing story is about the big one that didn’t get away.
Bruner and five friends headed out Saturday morning on a charter boat, hoping to catch some grouper to enter in the annual Destin Fishing Rodeo.
Instead, Bruner landed a gargantuan 844.4-pound mako shark, setting a new record for the decades-old tournament.
The money quote…
…“Ninety-nine percent of the time we catch sharks and let them go. (But) it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Blech. It’s easy to be a catch and release afficianado. Until the BIG one…the schmaybe once in every twentieth person’s lifetime… comes along, which SHOULD leave one in a moral quandary. (‘Should’ being the operative word.)
Thank goodness he got his trophy so no one else would have to wrestle with the choice.
But seein’ as how old shark was 844.4 pounds…maybe someone else had made a different decision…a coupla hundred pounds…and decades ago.
Morality | tree hugging sister | 
October 14, 2007 9:41 pm
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Yeah, if not “once in a lifetime”, at least one opportunity to put principle before ego. But hey, the “annual Destin Fishing Rodeo”, shark division, record was at stake.
I mean, come on.
Makes me ill. If it manages to last that long, I think it deserves to die of old age.
I thought the same thing when I read the article.
“What a magnificent beast, let’s kill it!”
Then again, I fished growing up and now I can’t bait a hook. Wuss.
Can you even eat those kind of sharks? I tend to feel like the main reason for fishing is to eat what you catch.
(I know I sure as hell wouldn’t eat any of the “world record catfish” they catch around here. Too many potential toxins or carcinogens that they’ve sucked up off the lake bottoms in the past 50 or 60 years.)
(Hunting, it’s a bit more complex. Several of the popularly-hunted species – at least, deer and wild hogs – have had such population booms they’ve become pests in many areas. So I don’t feel at all bad when someone takes down a giant “Hogzilla” that was probably doing a lot of damage to the forest)