Ass Hooked Whitey Harpoons Donny Beaver; We Pile On

Damn! Ass Hooked Whitey beat me to this one; the price I pay for taking on too much work and trying to get out of town.

AHW shot a big harpoon into Donny Beaver of the Spring Ridge Club for comments he made in the club’s January newsletter.

More on that farther down the post. First, I’ve been meaning to comment on a monster puff interview in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper where Donnie Beaver maintains that he’s a conservationist, and that he’s baffled by the hostility towards him.

While I won’t nauseate you with the whole interview, Beaver uncorks a doozie halfway through that left me speechless:

“To this date, we have never shut off a single inch of water that was publicly accessible,” Beaver said.

Huh? Unlawfully attempting to keep anglers from floating down the navigable Little Juniata in order to keep the unwashed masses from fishing his heavily stocked part of the river isn’t “shutting off a single inch of water?”

Sadly, the reporter didn’t challenge this or any of Donnie’s other assertions, suggesting a Pulitzer is not in the offing.

Rather than create a laundry list of the items where Donnie’s words don’t agree with is actions, we return to the Spring Ridge Club’s January newsletter (originally published in a public directory on the club’s site), where Donny Beaver reveals his “Trojan Horse” marketing plan for attending shows.

As all of you may already know, there remains a lot of controversy about private property rights as they relate to fly-fishing. In particular, there has been some animosity directed toward the Club and to me personally over the years.

We have found that the best tradeshow protocol is the “Trojan Horse” approach . . . in other words, have the Club blend into someone else’s booth. In the past we have done in this in two ways:

During the first two years of the Club, we also owned an outfitting business called “Angling Fantasies.” AF offered day trips and guide services to private waters, and the general fly-fishing public seemed to LOVE the idea that they could gain access to hallowed” private waters.

It was very successful. At the trade shows, we would keep Club materials under the table in case someone fit the “club profile.” However, the outfitting business was out front.

For a couple of shows, we also became a sub-set of the Frontiers Travel booth, which worked the same way.

OK. Kinda jerky perspective on the public (and I wonder how many of my readers fit the “club profile”) but as someone with 21+ years in marketing, I’ve been in a few of these discussions.

Hardly a fit with the wholesome conservationist persona he’s pushing these days, but if you want to know how Donny really feels about you, read this little gem from the same newsletter:

Three years ago, we dropped the “outfitting angle” and decided that people had to join the Club or not fish with us. Well, that really brought out the worst in the “public.” They’d say, “You’re the greedy SOBs who charge $80,000 to join and keep us poor working slobs off the water.”

Actually, Donny, we’d say “you’re the greedy SOB who tried to unlawfully prevent public float access to the Little Juniata to keep us poor working slobs off your stocked water.”

I’m not going to rail against private ownership of good fishing water, but I am going to suggest that Donny Beaver’s attempts to wrap himself in the flag of conservation pretty much peg the smell-o-meter.

In simplest terms, his attitude towards the general public pretty much sucks.

Kudos to Ass Hooked Whitey for getting out first on this one.

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