Posted on August 26 2010
Journalists love a good fish-attack story, if what came up in the net this month is any indication.
In a freshwater parallel to the recent “frenzied” attack by a marlin that “charged” a press boat in Hawaii, a carp knocked Missouri 340 kayak racer Brad Pennington out of contention (the AP sensibly cited “panic”).
Meanwhile a carp gave a woman a black eye in the Great Lakes “Redneck tournament” (nets only). Note: the “Great Lakes Guardians” “netted nearly 500 fish, the tournament total was 3,288 carp, which didn’t make a dent in the population.”
And who wasn’t touched by the story of the 14-year-old girl who was “terrorized” by a flying 45-inch barracuda. “It looked like a crime scene.”
Granted, there are some large fish predators that might have developed a taste for humans, but this seems to happen most where corpses are disposed of in rivers.
Either Moby Dick was not required reading when most of our fishing journalists went through high school, or fish paranoia may be in fact growing in the age of Texting.