by “Tackle Box” Billy Kelley

Annoyances and nuisances

Hey, folks. Sorry if any of my devoted fans missed my column last month. Now, I ain’t gonna blame my editor or publisher or printer of any such people. I’ll not blame any mucky-mucks that are on a higher rung of the ladder. Let’s just call it a minor annoyance, which in turn leads us to my column this month.

You know, we think about and deal with one annoyance or another constantly. And it seems the more modern we get, the more minor pains we have to deal with. Oh my gosh, where could I start? How ’bout the TV. That’s a contraption that could drive a person right foolish — the commercials and such. And they weren’t bad enough. Oh gosh, no. Now we have to go through infomercials. What’s next, day-long-mercials?

But this is about fishing annoyances, and there’s a bunch. Lately my biggest annoyance is those damn seals. See, fish can smell pretty good. Believe it or not, a shark can smell a drop of blood a mile away. Really, I ain’t makin’ this up. Now, mackerels and stripers and such can smell — maybe not that good, but they can smell. And they can smell a seal a long ways.

Trouble is, I’m not sure how to classify seals — I mean, as an annoyance or a big goddamn problem. Getting your line tangled — well, that’s an annoyance. A seal in the vicinity — big problem.

Now that we’ve established that, let me mention another annoyance that you just can’t defeat. I don’t care if you fish or not — if you live, I’d guess, within 10 miles of Portland Harbor, I guaran-fuckin-tee you will be annoyed at some point by a goddamn scavenger seagull. Actually, I ought to be calling them a nuisance (which annoys me, having to look that word up in a dictionary for spelling). They are the biggest darn nuisance on the whole waterfront.

You’d think it’d be flies, but for some reason it’s not. I believe it might be the wind to drive them off. They’re no kind of pain in the ass like a seagull. Jesus, I ’member the police actually allowing railroad workers to scoot down the old bridge off Commercial Street blasting them with fireworks as they went. Boy, you want a commotion! They’d toss an M-80 and all of a sudden the whole damn sky’s moving. (Well, a little exaggeration. But not much.)

And talk about a pest. I’ve had them come and swoop down and try to wrestle the fish right off my line. I’ve blinked and missed a goddamn gull grab my lunch. Oh, but of course we had our little tricks to pull on them rotten flying rats. We’d take and tie a fish on each end of about six foot of fishing line, then toss them out but good. Well, you know them greedy bastards would grab both of them and never let go. You have to imagine their futures.

During a more wealthy period we’d stuff a firework (lit) in a fish and heave her out. That would make a true mess — no-good, rotten animals splattered all over the place. Or the ol’ Alka-Seltzer trick would work.

You know, now that I’m older, I figure the gulls do have their place in the scope of things. That is, they do kinda keep the harbor a little cleaner, scooping up dead fish or whatever, even each other (believe it or not; I seen it — disgusting).

The best thing would be if the nasty creatures were edible. You could probably go out and get a hunting license and blast away. Christ, everybody would get one — there’s so many, how’d you miss? You could go into, say, DiMillo’s and say to the waiter, “Yes, we’d like the seagull under glass.” And the waiter would respond, “Oui, monsieur. A perfect choice. I do say, will that be with our prized seafood sauce? It goes very well on dead seagulls.”

Which puts on my other idea: shooting seals. Them guys are impossible to miss. I throw rocks at them all the time to get rid of ’em. Trouble is, the fuckers think I’m feeding ’em!

You know an Eskimo’s favorite food? Didn’t think you did. It’s seal eyes. They just love ’em. So, unless you’re Survivor Man, we don’t anticipate a plateful of seagulls. But let us get some seals out of circulation. That would help everything.

If I had to guess, I’d say this column is starting to annoy folks. After all, some of you folks actually still feed these obnoxious pests. Well, your business.