Roughly one million fishing licenses are sold in Minnesota each year. North Dakota’s annual number is closer to 186,000. I happen to be one included in this figure.

I first enjoyed fishing as a youngster when traveling from Kansas to Table Rock Lake, Missouri, with my parents and grandparents each summer. Dad and Grandpa loved to fish there. Angling for Crappie was most successful after dark with a lantern suspended from the limb of a partially submerged tree along the shoreline. As minnows were drawn to the light, crappie were drawn toward minnows — including any attached to the end of a dangling line. This brought good Table Rock fishing memories. But, there were some hazards.

Dad seem convinced that fish were hungriest as soon as they climbed out of bed each morning. This meant leaving the dock at 5:30 a.m. in a rented nine-foot aluminum boat. We headed out in pitch dark one moonless morning toward a distant shoreline to offer up an irresistible worm breakfast buffet.

Once a cinderblock anchor was dropped twenty yards from shore, Dad took the flashlight to survey options for delivery of our smorgasbord. The light fell upon a poisonous water moccasin slithering toward the boat. Dad seldom showed much excitement. But, after delivering a panicked serpent assassination attempt with an oar, he jerked the outboard’s rope for our hasty get away, dragging the anchor behind.

That afternoon, we anchored once more, this time in a secluded cove to cast tempting lures toward the rocky shoreline as I sat straddling the pointed bow, dangling my feet in the cool water. I could see more snakes sunning themselves on the rugged embankment. That was fine – until I glanced down to notice snakes swimming past my bare feet.

Since those early days, I’ve wet a line now and then from kick-boats, canoes, pontoons, docks and chartered vessels with far less success than I witnessed during a different fishing opportunity three years ago in Alaska. A good friend’s daughter invited me on her salmon fishing trawler she operates in the waters of Prince William Sound between Whittier and Valdez. Once aboard, I located an out-of-the-way perch to watch how commercial salmon fishing is done.

Following a twenty-minute delay in line with similar boats, it was our skipper’s turn. The captain ordered a mate to pilot the skiff toward a nearby shore, dragging a lengthy seine net off the aft end of the trawler. Slipping bit by bit into the water, it was suspended at the surface by floats and hung down below to the floor of the bay. Once the skiff nosed into shore with one end of the net, the skipper began the trawler’s departure away from shore, dropping the rest of the seine off the stern along an arc to encircle salmon below.

As the trawler turned back toward shore, the skiff left its position to meet up with the trawler again and finish closing in the quarry hidden beneath. Both ends of the seine were then winched slowly back aboard, tightening the submerged noose. As the last remaining section of net came onboard, so too did a slew of salmon. Doors in the deck floor were opened for mates to slide the flopping catch into holding tanks below. Similar passes continued until tanks could hold no more.

The skipper then headed for the commercial fishing tender anchored not far away that vacuumed contents of holding tanks onto the much larger vessel for sorting, weighing and later processing – except for two that found their way to our dinner table later than evening.

Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfess) once chucked chum off the back of Quint’s (Robe Shaw) boat, Orca, in the movie Jaws (1975) as they sought to lure the three-ton Great White, Jaws, toward its demise. Remembering what Hooper said to Quint after first laying eyes on Jaws, I now know what holds the key to my future fishing success: I need to get a bigger boat.