Challenged by the law

It was a beautiful sunny Florida day with temperature in the low 80”s when I took my daughter and her family out on a 22 ‘pontoon boat ﬁshing. I belong to the freedom boat club which enables me to take outs boats from any Marina in SW Florida.
After about a 15 minute boat ride we cast our lines and immediately we caught ﬁsh. I had a ﬁsh stringer which allowed me keep the ﬁsh on a rope in the water. We were all having so much fun. We caught 7 spotted trout. My grandson said he needed to go the rest room, so I navigated the boat back to the marina and much to my chagrin there was a wild life sheriﬀ standing by the dock. He saw my rope with the ﬁsh trailing in the water, came up to me and told me I was in big trouble. Ignorantly I asked why and he informed me the ﬁsh were under sized and the ﬁne is $1000/ﬁsh. He further explained that because my grandchildren witnessed this legal infraction he could call DCF, he could also take the boat away and have it conﬁscated.

He then proceeded to take all my spotted trout, took pictures of them, wrote my citation. Since it was the day before Thanksgiving and the ﬁrst time ever I went ﬁshing, I pleaded with him to just let me go with the promise I would never ﬁsh agiain. He then proceeded to tell me how nice he was by not conﬁscating my boat and how lucky I was that none of the ﬁsh were a snook. Catching a snook and keeping it is a felony.

I then was forced to hire a lawyer, paid $250 ﬁne, $750 lawyer fee and that wonderful day cost me $1000.

I then took a picture of all the rules as to size and the various ﬁsh species, had it laminated and include a measuring tape as part of my boating equipment.
There was a large lesson to be learned here, and to this day I have no idea why I wanted to keep the ﬁsh we caught as we had no intention of eating them.

This was certainly a day the Orkin family will never ever forget or stop chuckling about.