"THAT WASN'T IN MY BOOK!"

By Sr. Agent Frank A. Reger

Have you ever noticed that whenever a person has violated the law, the law that they broke was not in their hunting or fishing pamphlet, or they said they read the whole book, but must have missed that page. I find it interesting how much information is missing from these pamphlets. I always seem to be able to find the "missing" parts in the twenty or thirty copies that I carry in my truck and boat.

I was working on Caddo Lake in April of 2002. I had gone towards the dam, when I noticed two men in a small Jon boat. I saw them pick up a net. I waited and watched the two. They never threw anything back. They emptied the contents of the net into the boat, and then they threw the net back in the water. When they began to leave, I identified myself and asked to see their licenses. The guy in the back said he had commercial licenses, and I allowed him to fish for his paperwork. I noticed that they had an ice chest in the bottom of the boat. I asked if he had done any good, and he said that he had done alright. Strangely though, he never offered to show me his catch. I asked to look in his ice chest, and as he flipped the lid, he asked me, "Am I supposed to throw back all those bream?" I put the ice chest in my boat and removed the bream. As I was digging out the bream, I noticed that the catfish seemed to be small. After measuring his catfish, I discovered that he had 40% undersized channel catfish, well over the 10% limit. I informed him that he could not keep any game fish and was only allowed to have 10% undersized catfish.