Sure, you could become a guide and get paid, but everyone knows you’re not fly fishing when you’re guiding – you’re simply holding the hands of people who can’t fish, but have more money than you.

Besides, guiding’s a one-way ticket to an advanced degree in body piercing, courtesy clients who can’t cast.

No, my little Undergrounders – your path to professional status comes via the Pikeminnow Sport Reward Fishery, a power-company funded attempt to preserve Salmon and Steelhead in the Columbia and Snake rivers.

Sure, a few nattering nabobs will say that controlling predators across an entire ecosystem in an attempt to bolster a fading species is a one-way ticket to the environmental equivalent of the fiery abyss, but I’m pretty sure they’re just jealous eggheads who couldn’t catch a Pikeminnow if it jumped into their hands.

From the Pikeminnow Sport Reward Site:

In the 2008 season, we will pay anglers for fish 9 inches and larger. The reward will remain the same at $4-$8 for each northern pikeminnow caught in the lower Columbia (mouth to Priest Rapids Dam) and Snake (mouth to Hells Canyon Dam) rivers. This year’s qualifying tagged fish will be worth $500.

Lemme see: if all the Internet stories we read are true, then most Internet Experts Who Couldn’t Catch a Non-Virtual Fish fly fishermen could clear a couple hundred a day.

For some, that only covers the daily cost of cigars hookers and booze, but for rugged individuals knowledgable in the ways of the wily Pikeminnow (like the grubstake-seeking Singlebarbed), it’s a plan for retirement in five years or less.

I say we quit our jobs en masse and establish a Pikeminnow Bum camp on the Columbia.

It’s Friday, most of you have started drinking already, so who’s with me? (Pumping fist in the air, fight-the-power style.)

I say we can’t miss.

See you at the Pikeminnow check-in station (and I’ll be rich), Tom Chandler.

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