As the World Turns: A fish story*

By Ed Rogers

A couple of weeks ago, our colleague Paul Clark (aka motomynd) brought to my attention a news story out of British Columbia about a fisherman being sentenced to a lifetime fishing ban and prohibited from ever being aboard a fishing vessel again (story by David Strege, MSN). Paul asked whether Vancouver Harbour isn’t on the fringe of my old Northwest haunts.
    Indeed it is. The city of Vancouver is right across the border from Washington. My friend Edda’s brother and sister lived there. Fishing and crabbing are highly controlled in both Canada and Washington. A lot of people up there live off the water, and generations of people know no other way of life. New laws come along telling them not to do things that their family has always done, and that leads to problems like the guy in the news story had.