If you want to catch a hodgepodge of fish without burning a lot of fuel, head for this Lake Hermitage-area water body.
My daughter, who is very involved at our local playground, was asked last month to fill in for a no-show umpire during a softball game between two teams of younger girls.
She’s a very intelligent and conscientious kid (traits she obviously inherited from her mother), but still I had to, for my sake, give her a few pointers before she ran out there to be arbiter and judge of something so important as a 9- and 10-year-old softball game.
“Watch every play closely, make your calls emphatically and then stick by them,” I told her.She nodded in agreement, then paused for a moment.
“I will, Dad,” she said. “And I don’t care if anybody gets mad. No matter what call I make, half the people are going to be happy and the other half aren’t.”
Wisdom beyond her years.
The Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission could learn a lot from my 13-year-old daughter.
This state board, comprised of seven commissioners appointed by the governor, is responsible for setting fish and game regulations within the normally broad parameters established by the Legislature.
The LWFC used to be a hyper-political body that routinely ignored the wishes of anglers and hunters and approved rules and regulations that favored fat cats and brothers-in-law.
But now the pendulum has apparently swung to the other side. Rather than being hyper-political, the LWFC is now hyper-sensitive, trying to please everybody on all sides of every issue.
And in the end, they’re frequently pleasing nobody — especially not the people who are paid to advise them, the biologists at the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
Last year, the commission altered Area 6 hunting dates so many times, hunters weren’t exactly sure on the eve of the season whether they were legal or not. The commission initially awarded an extra 22 days of gun hunting to Area 6, with a muzzleloader season-opener of Oct. 30, far earlier than biologists recommend for that area.
At its next meeting, the commission reversed course, changed all the openers and cut 21 days from the Area 6 gun seasons.
The commission last year also voted to allow nearly three extra weeks of squirrel season statewide, having the season end, for the first time ever, at the end of February.
“We were doing a study as to whether the squirrel population could handle the extra pressure, and (the commission) caught us in the second year of the three-year study,” DWF Wildlife Division Administrator Moreland said. “We kind of wanted to finish the study (before any changes were made).”
Then this year, at its May meeting, the commission voted to ban dog hunting for deer for any landowner or lessee with fewer than 2,000 contiguous acres in the Atchafalaya Basin. The move appeared to be in reaction to public pressure, since a majority of private landowners in the Basin are opposed to dog hunting.
But the ink wasn’t even dry on the paper directing the change when the commission began taking heat from dog hunters, and one commissioner stated publicly that he regretted his vote.
At its June meeting, the commission did another about-face, and rescinded the regulation change.
“This commission is more tuned in to hunters who are calling them, and I guess that’s good,” Moreland said. “But sometimes it can get a little cumbersome when you try to listen to everybody and grant their wishes.”
The current commission would make terrible umpires.