Are you receiving our weekly email alerts? On Mondays we send out a news update with updated fishing reports, while every Thursday I do a little video forecast for the weekend ahead. If you’re not currently on our email list you can update your account as a print subscriber by going to My Account at TheFisherman.com.
The weekly video forecasts are fun to do, collecting several days’ worth of catch photos from different anglers and matching them up to the latest reports from local sources to take a stab at a weekend forecast. Sometimes I get it right, other times I completely whiff; it’s just like real fishing I guess, sometimes you catch ‘em and other times you don’t.
Which brings me to my inane observation for the week; just how far can “political correctness” go today before society as a whole pulls a Howard Beale (see the movie Network) and screams madly out their collective window “I’m not going to take this anymore”? Case in point; in my May 16th video forecast, I added a rather typical signoff to the weekly segment saying “Catch ‘em up!” It’s always been a pretty standard cliché in fishing used by a whole lot of anglers over the course of a whole lot of years when wishing good luck to fellow fishermen.
“Hey catch ‘em up this weekend Fred,” followed by the obligatory “Yeah you too Jim, catch ‘em up!”
Well apparently, some members of the angling public now find this term offensive.
“You always end with ‘catch em up’ which kinda conveys the wrong message, especially in these days of overfishing,” noted one poster at our YouTube channel. I’m sorry, is it just me? I had always thought that fishing was all about “catching” fish; isn’t that why you read The Fisherman, to find out what others are using to successfully catch fish, and where and how they’re catching them?
A lot of folks talk about the “angling experience” and how we do what we do (often passionately, through many sleepless nights and frequent visits to the proverbial doghouse) not solely to catch fish but to simply enjoy our experience in nature. If you’ve ever seen me play golf, you’d know my nature walks occur in 18 rounds worth of rooting around the woods for lost balls; heck, sitting in a sneakbox in the dead of winter watching broadbills settle into the spread ain’t much fun without the 12-guage either.
We fish to catch something; whether we choose a safe and healthy release, or a legal and sustainable harvest for dinner seems mostly irrelevant to the topic at hand. Ultimately, we fish with the goal of “catching,” which I always thought was the entire point of putting a hook at the end of a line.
Are we not meddling with the primal forces of nature simply by our mere existence as humans? Should I now atone for leaving my footprint on the sands upon which I cast a line and hook? Sorry, I just love that movie; I also love fishing, and more importantly I love catching fish.
So, if you’re heading out for a boat ride this week or a walk along the beach, “nature it up.” If you’re looking to play some catch and release on school stripers, well go ahead and “catch ‘em up.” And if you’re hitting the sea bass grounds prior to the June 22 season closure in New Jersey, by all means, “box ‘em up!”
PC enough for you?
