03/27/2026
Yesterday I took one of our club members up to the Tampa Aquarium for the day (I purchase the yearly pass for 4 persons).
On the way back, I was telling Jason about when I was a police officer in NY, my partner and I had a little stand up comic routine we used to do in friends bars after the 4-12 shift ; they called us "The Comedy Cops/ the Guys with the Arresting Humor."
I also had a little routine called "The Ethenia Sportsman/ Hunting and Fishing in Ethenia" It's a compiling of ethnic jokes and haggy dog stories changed to fit hunters and fishermen from the mythical country of Ethenia. The natives called Ethnics, or Ethies . So, who but a too highy sensitive person can get outraged about jokes about a people who don't exist?
In any case I went through a half dozen or so of with Jason and reflecting upon it I remember a few weeks I spent in Alaska at Katmai Loge with my friends Chet Adamcyzk, Chris Gouras and a couple of others where we took as many stories and jokes and converted them into Ethenian Jokes. Chet was Polish, Chris was Greek, I'm English, etc.
At the end of the trip I asked, "How many of you have ever caught a fish on your last cast? Or did that just prompt you to keep fishing?"
Seems that none of had as if we caught one on what WAS to be our last cast, we kept fishing.
So we decided that we would (this was Alaska, remember hundreds of miles from the nearest road) each of us would catch a fish and then put our rod away so that all five of us would have caught one on our last cast. One by one we stowed our rods and then as it does even in Alask, they abruptly stopped hitting. Chris cast and cast and cast without success for over an hour.
Suddenly the rod was nearly ripped from him hands and for the next 45 minutes we chased that fish all over the river. Chris and the rest of us were sure that he had a record or at least the biggest fish on the trip on his line.
Finally, we got it to the boat. There is was , a measly 10 lb silver (but on a 4 wt) firmly hooked dead center through the a**s with a 1/0 hook! No wonder it fought so hard as anyone who has ever foul hooked a decent fish in the aft knows.
Well, Chris took a lot of "Ethnic" jokes about Greek jokes on the flight back~!