I’d have to imagine that most anglers have had some kind of encounter with a game warden. I have had several, and while some guys get all heated over an authority figure horning in on their outdoor time, I take comfort in the fact that these men and women are out there doing their job and protecting the resources you and I hold near and dear. I am more than happy to provide my license, driver’s license or whatever else they need because I am always within the law when it comes to licensing, limits and whatever else is in the abstract.
I will admit that I had one encounter that wasn’t all lollipops and rainbows. The short version is I was testing plugs in a pond down the street from my house about 10 years ago. It was around the first week of March and it slipped my mind that trout-stocked waters were off-limits at the time. I had the 8-inch plugs in a plastic shopping bag as I was walking out and who was walking down the trail but Johnny Law.
I showed him the contents of the bag and the surf rod I was using, but he was still not pleased that I was “fishing” in a stocked pond during a prohibited fishing season. I tried to tell him that no stockie trout would even dream of hitting the plugs I was throwing, but he was all about the book. At the end of the ordeal he gave me a written warning, which he told me will remain on my record forever. How lovely that is. But as much as I wanted him to acknowledge that there really was a difference between what I was doing and actually targeting trout, I didn’t argue, because technically I was breaking the rules… and at least he didn’t give me a ticket!
There’s a low-key viral video going around of body cam footage from a DEEP officer checking licenses on Connecticut’s Mill River back on April 28, 2025. He encountered an individual who had 14 trout on his stringer, which is 12 over the legal limit. When asked if he had a fishing license and driver’s license he told the officer they were in the car. He then told the officer he was going to throw the fish back, but the officer told him he couldn’t do that because they were all dead! There’s one quote from the officer that I think should be part of the game warden’s handbook, he said, “if you will be cool with me, I will be cool with you.” In other words, be straight with me and I will find a way to go easier on you.
Come to find out, this guy did NOT have a fishing license, and so obviously he had no trout stamp either, tallying two additional violations on top of the 12 others for each fish over the legal limit. The DEEP officer went over all the rules with him, did not take his gear, gave him the CT Fishing Guide so he could brush up on the regs and saved him $500 by not charging for all his violations. The ticket still totaled $1,848.
I wanted to highlight this encounter because I thought the officer, not named in the video, handled it like a pro. He took the time to assess the situation at the individual level, the offender seemed genuinely uninformed, which was definitely his own fault. I mean, if you’re driving on the highway and see no speed limit signs, you don’t assume you should go 120 mph! But he was also cooperative, friendly and kind of took the “you’re right, what I did was stupid” approach to dealing with being caught.
At the surface level, the moral of the story is not to assume that you will never be caught doing something so egregiously beyond the common sense of the law. But it’s the “below the skin” moral that really stands out for me and is something that we could all use an extra spoonful of now and then. And that is to be human to each other in every situation. In a position of authority, read the room, be fair and show some leniency when someone meets you close enough to the middle to earn it. But also be stern when someone does something so egregious that common sense says they had to know what they were doing couldn’t possibly be legal. If you are the accused lower the temperature by being cooperative and keeping conversation intensity at zero.
After watching this a couple times, I think, if the angler had been completely honest up front, he might have gotten off with a $500 fine. It was the lying about the license that cranked the fine up to the middle latitudes. In the end, I felt that the punishment fit the crime and the angler deserved to pay every penny for his offenses. I’ll say it again, the officer nailed this entire interaction and I thought that fact made this worth highlighting. Big respect to CT DEEP.
