As someone who likes to shoot docks during the spring for crappie and skip docks during the summer for bass, I’ve had my share of run-ins with dock owners who thought I should be elsewhere.
On one Alabama lake, a guy who routinely cursed at us in German was once affectionately known as “The Germanator.” On another lake just down the same river chain, we sometimes wore our rain suits to fish a particular dock where a lady was known for spraying people with a water hose.
The right way to handle such incidents – as we did with both of those situations – is to just laugh them off.
But when you encounter something like what Mark Menendez had to deal with on Day 2 of the Elite Series event on the St. Lawrence River July 31, sometimes turning the other cheek just doesn’t make the proper statement.
I’m glad he did what he did.
To hear Menendez tell it, he was fishing down a bank when a man became upset over him casting near his dock. When Menendez refused to leave on the grounds that he was legally fishing public waters, the man became so enraged that he ultimately got into his own boat to physically harass and threaten the angler.
Menendez said the man even went as far as hurling racial and ethnic slurs at him simply because he had “Menendez” written across the back of his jersey.
As fishermen, we should always try not to rock the boat. We should recognize that we’re sharing water with dock owners, pleasure boaters and swimmers, who have as much right to it as we do.
But at some point, the “don’t-rock-the-boat” rule has to apply to the other groups as well – and our rights as fishermen have to be recognized.
Fishermen do as much to keep American waterways clean, beautiful and accessible as any of the other groups I just mentioned. Our governments recognize that, and it’s why most states have laws on the books to prevent angler harassment.
New York is one of those states, and Menendez availed himself of the legal system by filing a formal complaint against the man in question on the St. Lawrence. As of Monday afternoon, witnesses were still being interviewed in the matter, and I wouldn’t be surprised if action is taken soon.
Good for Mark.
Good for the system.
Beneath the various stories written about this incident, I’ve been surprised to see that some people have commented that Menendez should have just stayed away from the man’s dock. I even saw some comments that suggested anglers should be good enough at their craft that they don’t need to fish around docks.
I don’t understand the basis for those comments.
Public means public.
Shared means shared.
Most importantly, the law is the law.
Another thing I haven’t really understood about the fallout from the Menendez incident is people complaining about him “playing the race card.”
Evidently, some folks have a different definition for that term than I do.
If I was to sift through the Elite Series roster and make a list of the anglers most likely to be piping mad about anything after a weigh-in, Mark Menendez would be near the bottom – just behind soft-spoken Arkansas country boy Mark Davis and just ahead of perennial good guy Randy Howell.
It takes a lot to get Mark riled, but he was ready to chew through Tungsten after this incident – and only partly because the man had wrongfully tried to deny him access to public water.
Just when it seemed the man had been as offensive as he could possibly be, Menendez said he started in on him for being Hispanic.
He cussed him because of his last name, because of his family’s foreign lineage. So Menendez decided to add “hate crime” to the many offenses he believes the man committed.
How is he wrong?
If a race card was played, wasn’t the other guy the one who dealt it?
Menendez just decided if he was going to pursue this legally, he was going all the way.
He was determined to make a statement in defense of himself, in defense of other anglers who’ve dealt with similar situations and in defense of all the good dock owners who would never think of doing such a thing.
The truth is 99.9999 percent of dock owners aren’t threatened at all by fishermen. Some even welcome anglers – like the “Tomato Lady” who left bags of fresh tomatoes during a couple of Bassmaster Classic events in Alabama during the early 1990s.
It’s that other 0.0001 percent that make columns like this necessary – and I’m glad to see Mark Menendez doing everything he can to keep that percentage from growing.