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    The Fisherman's Prayer: Stories, Poems, and Prayers<Br> from The<Br> Olympic Peninsula
    The Fisherman's Prayer: Stories, Poems, and Prayers<Br> from The<Br> Olympic Peninsula
    The Fisherman's Prayer: Stories, Poems, and Prayers<Br> from The<Br> Olympic Peninsula
    Ebook123 pages1 hour

    The Fisherman's Prayer: Stories, Poems, and Prayers
    from The
    Olympic Peninsula

    By Pat Neal

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Pat Neal has a problem. It's not gambling, drinking, or sex. His addiction comes in the form of the salmon and steelhead that swim in the rainforest rivers of the Olympic Peninsula. As a child, he was diagnosed with a severe case of fishing attention deficit disorder (FADD), a disease that plagues him to this day. Of his fellow fishing enthusiasts, Neal notes:

    "People with fishing problems may spend inordinate amounts of time talking about their disease, even if they do show up for work. Most anglers are in complete denial over how much they spend on fishing until other members of the family start whining about food or shoes."


    Based upon the ever-popular Lord's Prayer, The Fisherman's Prayer has been reformulated for today's modern fishing conditions and is not limited to the water. The Fisherman's Prayer works on all species of fresh and saltwater game fish. Don't go fishing without a prayer!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateAug 20, 2007
    ISBN9780595887941
    The Fisherman's Prayer: Stories, Poems, and Prayers<Br> from The<Br> Olympic Peninsula
    Author

    Pat Neal

    Pat Neal, a fishing guide, began writing the newspaper column WildLife in 1998.These stories offer a natural history of the Olympic Peninsula based on his research as a historian for the Washington State Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation and the life of a guide. He lives among big trees along the Hoh River. This is his fourth book.

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      Book preview

      The Fisherman's Prayer - Pat Neal

      The Fisherman’s Prayer

      Stories, Poems, and Prayers from the Olympic Peninsula

      Pat Neal

      iUniverse, Inc.

      New York Lincoln Shanghai

      The Fisherman’s Prayer

      Stories, Poems, and Prayers from the Olympic Peninsula

      Copyright © 2007 by Pat Neal

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any

      means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

      iUniverse

      2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100

      Lincoln, NE 68512

      www.iuniverse.com

      1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any Web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

      The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      ISBN: 978-0-595-44467-0 (pbk)

      ISBN: 978-0-595-69438-9 (cloth)

      ISBN: 978-0-595-88794-1 (ebk)

      Printed in the United States of America

      Contents

      Author’s Note

      The True Cost of Fishing

      How Fishing Laws Are Made

      Tourist Season

      Olympic Peninsula Retirement Guide

      Ain’t No Bugs on Me

      Trailhead Trash Talk

      How to Weigh a Fish

      The Dungeness Special

      Shanghaied!

      Mars Fishing Update

      The Ten Commandments of Fishing

      The Fisherman’s Prayer Test Fishing Report

      Illustrations

      The Fisherman’s Prayer

      Fisherman’s Serenity Prayer

      23 ¡2 Psalm

      Upriver

      River Bird

      River Birds

      River Monkey

      Judgment

      The Last Fish of Summer

      Alien Fish Camp

      Fishing in Winter

      A Lonely River

      Guide Grudge

      Guide School

      About the Author

      For Sharon

      Then He said, Throw out your net on the right hand side of the boat, and you’ll get plenty of them! So we did, and couldn’t draw in the net because of the weight of the fish, there were so many!

      —John 2: 6

      An especially fine piece of feyness. Neal writes like a waterlogged dropout of the Ed Abbey/Richard Brautigan ‘school,’ like a man too wise to pawn his river time for fame.

      —David James Duncan Author of The River Why.

      Author’s Note 

      These stories may have appeared as columns at one time or another in various newspapers in Washington State.

      The True Cost of Fishing 

      People are always asking me how much it costs to go fishing. The fact that someone would even ask a question like that reveals a deep-rooted, guilt-ridden, shame-based sinkhole of personal problems that’s not uncommon among people who fish. One man’s obsessive-compulsive hoarding disorder is another man’s tackle box collection.

      Most anglers are in complete denial over how much they spend on fishing until other members of the family start whining about food or shoes. As a fishing guide and unlicensed relationship counselor, I’ve seen first-hand the effects of the fishing problem on a free and open society.

      The true costs of fishing are paid by all of us. The effects have to include the loss of productivity in business and industry. If you’ve ever been unlucky enough to work with someone with a fishing problem, then you know how it can affect job performance.

      People with fishing problems may spend inordinate amounts of time talking about their disease, even if they do show up for work.

      All too often, some fishermen will stop production to insist that everyone look at their fish pictures, or make coworkers take time out from their busy day to check out a dead fish in the back of my truck. Untold hours are wasted listening to those one-that-got-away fables that all have one thing in common: an inbred sense of failure that only makes a bad fishing problem worse. Add up all the other miscellaneous expenses associated with fishing—$1,000 rods, $500 reels, divorce—and you can understand how the negative effects of fishing could stall the economic recovery that made our country so cool.

      Someone with a bad fishing problem can’t admit to themselves how many fish they did or didn’t catch. Just ask any fisherman how many he caught and he’ll invariably tell you how many he hooked.

      Hooking a fish and catching it are two different things. But people with fishing problems often can’t tell the difference. On any given body of water, half the fishermen may be hooking imaginary fish or snags they pretend are fish just to impress the other fishermen. Go ahead and ask the average fisherman if he’s catching anything. Often, they don’t know themselves. If the fishermen can’t admit they didn’t catch a fish, it’s unlikely they’ll know how much money they spent not catching it.

      To illustrate the true costs of fishing, I dumped my tackle box in the river. As I watched the colorful assortment of lures float away—the ones that didn’t immediately sink, anyway—I paused to calculate the value of this experiment. I determined the value of the contents of that tackle box at roughly $500. This figure was determined by an accounting method designed specifically for fishing: fish math.

      To apply this form of accounting, each number is rounded off, then multiplied or divided by a factor of two, depending on whom you’re talking to.

      Still, no amount of money can compare to the human costs of fishing. I did not get this way by myself; I had help. I grew up in a family in which social fishing was acceptable behavior. I began fishing early. Perhaps it was a genetic pre-disposition. We were plunking worms in the Elwha River.

      In this enlightened age of catch-and-release fishing, of barb-less hooks on artificial lures, fishing with worms seems like a nightmare straight out of the dark ages. But no … it was even worse than that.

      Back then, I’d do anything to get worms—anything, that is, except buy them. Every dime I had went for hooks, line, swivels, and lead sinkers that would get the worms down to the bottom of the river. Worms were easy to find in the spring when it was wet, but by summer, I’d do anything for a worm. A dry August might find me weeding

      Mom’s flowerbed. She thought I was being a good boy for once, until she found out it

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