By Sean Sullivan Lagniappe columnist

There’s a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore like an idiot. – Steven Wright

Mardi Gras is here and that makes me want to…Fish. It’s not that I won’t enjoy a few parades and the cocktails and overeating that frame said parades, it’s just that I will be daydreaming of time on the water while I jockey for beads and street scrap for a pair of airbrushed Party Gras 2007 thong panties.

Although the date changes each year the beginning of Lent is the end of my advent for the fishing season. I know we are lucky enough to live in a place where you can successfully angle every month of the year, I just wait until after Mardi Gras.

I was mulling it over at a parade the other night, during which absent-mindedness resulted in me catching an oversized plastic toothbrush across the temple. I came to the conclusion that a Mardi Gras float and my fishing boat have a lot in common. First of all there is the float thing – one is and you hope the other does. There is also the easy parallel of casting things off said structures to hungry creatures.

Of course if speckled trout, redfish and bass were as voracious as the revelers on Washington Street, there wouldn’t be a fish left in the Gulf. I know what you’re thinking right now, “what if some of the throws had treble hooks in them and the maskers would hook an occasional parade goer and pull them on board and put them in really big ice chest?” Damn you’re weird, don’t let anybody know you think like that – but your secret is safe with me.

There is also the boat/float similarity in their unreliability. A boat motor will choose the most inappropriate times to quit or not start, usually in the face of an oncoming waterspout, lightning storm or out-of-control super tanker piloted by a captain who would make Joseph Hazelwood look like Carrie Nation. Very similarly, a truck pulling a float will overheat or a float tire will go flat or an axle will roll out from underneath the “Rock Around the Clock” float just as it makes it to the Government Street straightaway. Both occurrences result in the same profanity-laced exorcisms of the transportation in question. There is also the coolers full of beer on each float thing, but it’s probably a little safer on the ones with wheels.

The other thing I was thinking about during this extended daydream, with its soundtrack of “Ridin’ Dirty” courtesy of a local high school marching band, was that if more people fished, more would be done to protect our local waters. While we have a couple watchdog groups in south Alabama fighting to protect water quality, they can’t be everywhere and each year we learn of some other recent or ongoing water pollution issue facing our rivers and bay.

I am not advocating the half a million or so mass of Mardi Gras partiers all get up Ash Wednesday hook up the boat, grab some shrimp from Shirley’s Bait Shop and hit Pinto Pass; just that a few more would put the energy they invest in getting stupid hat-wearin, snap and pop-throwin’, drink-spillin’ drunk into getting on the water and enjoying the year ‘round party with the fish.

I don’t particularly look forward to more competition for fishing spots, but I do look forward to a numerous constituency that would fight like they party for protection of the local environment. There will be those of you that read this and think someone doesn’t need to fish to be concerned with the quality of our local watershed. Let me lob this one at you then hacky-sacker – wearing an enviro-friendly ski jacket or a pair of high-tech rafting sandals doesn’t make you nearly as concerned with water quality as the person who eats a dinner out of that water.

If more people fished I believe they would put their money and time where there mouth is and at the same time have more fun. Now back to the parades until Wednesday and then I’ll see you on the water.

Sean Sullivan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact him at ssullivan@lagniappemobile.com.

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