My first fishing experience was not really in Florida, it was in my office using my computer instead of my fishing pole: writing letters and waiting for a bite on my 'corporate sponsorship' bait. A deal was here to be made, money to go fishing in exchange for promotion of products and/or services. Seventy-five letters were sent out and most of the companies didn't even take the time to respond. There were a couple of responses; just enough for me to realize corporations get hundreds of letters each week with wild scheme proposals like mine.

Range Rover of America said they just might be interested in supporting this project, if I changed the fishing to playing polo or yachting. Now there's a variation of 'bait and switch'. Berkeley Outdoor Technologies Group was also interested, but the amount of money I thought I needed was more than their budget would allow. They were real nice and I was mad at myself for letting them off the line.

The third bite was from the president of a major motel chain which is located in South Dakota. He was willing to give me some certificates to stay in their motels if I wore a jacket and hat sporting their name whenever I was interviewed by the media. Yes, you betcha, Jack, I'll be right there! I was leaving Minnesota in a couple of days to fish five states back east and it didn't seem too far out of the way to make a swing through South Dakota first, so I did. I met the president of the company and I got ten certificates with a promise of 15 to 30 more when I ran out of these. They also offered one of the Vice Presidents, Dennis Shawd, to take me fishing for Sauger in Lake Oahe, a reservoir on the Missouri river.

Sauger is in the same fish family as the Walleye and the state considers Walleye and Sauger to be close enough relatives to share the same bag limit. In other words, a fisherman in South Dakota can catch four Walleye per day or four Sauger per day or any combination of each that adds up to four fish. A Sauger looks a lot like a Walleye only it is skinnier, it doesn't have the white on the bottom of its tail like the walleye, there are spots on the dorsal fin and its sides have vertical stripes like a Perch.

Dennis has fished for Walleye and Sauger all his life and he has figured out where the fish are and how to extract them from these waters, which is something many fishermen never figure out. He became a fishing guide working 110 to 120 days a year, wind and rain and cold and nothing stopped him. After ten years he just quit fishing, cold turkey! He never even thought about fishing for the next three years. Then one day one of his sons asked him to go fishing. He said, "Sure", went out and bought a boat and he's been fishing ever since. He was glad for the opportunity to take me fishing to show off his expertise and to get off work on a not-too-warm warm summer day. A near perfect day, he would say, over and over as he whistled and sang and talked to the fish.

I don’t know if we are far enough into this book to see the pattern, but I’m not a real good fisherman and I don’t catch a lot of fish. This trip is different.

We caught our limit of eight fish, seven Walleye and one Sauger. Dennis caught the Sauger. We caught so many fish, we kept upgrading our limit at seven fish for a long time, releasing the eight on when it was caught as I tried to hook a Sauger. I probably would have caught one, but the sky because dark and storm clouds gathered around us and lightning closing in from two sides. Everyone knows a boat isn't the best place to be at a time like this, so we left. At the boat ramp, people came up and asked, “Catch any fish?" Some were fascinated with our catch while others were threatened. Dennis said you can tell if a person is good at fishing just by checking his or her creel on any given day. Those who are good at fishing will have fish and those who are bad won't have any fish. There are exceptions to this rule, but generally speaking, this is true, "Some people know how to fish and some people don't." One of the boat ramp gawkers said he thought these were rather small fish. Dennis explained that the bigger ones are supposed to be returned to the water so as to breed. This guy wasn't listening and he told us about catching a 6 pounder. Dennis asked if that was a big fish. The guy realized he had his foot in his mouth and he left without answering.

On the way back to where Dennis lives, he told me about the 200' long fishing boat that is owned by his
company. It once was a barge used to tend Louisiana offshore oil drilling rigs, but it has since been converted to a fishing boat at a cost of $8,000,000. It has a helicopter port and boat houses for its 43' fishing boat, its 28' fishing boat and its 24' fishing boat. In the summer it is kept in Canadian waters real close to the Alaska border. During that time, 70 members of the company's upper management get to go to the boat for four or five days of meetings and fishing. They fly up on the company plane to Ketchikan and then to Prince Rupert where they catch a pontoon plane that takes them to the boat. Ten employees go at a time. When the plane returned to pick them up it drops off ten more employees until all 70 members of management have been there.

The company anchored their boat near a couple of Canadian floating fishing camps. It's the same old story, you see a bunch of boats together and you say, "This looks like a good place to fish." The operators of these fishing camps resented the Americans coming into their fishing grounds, so they complained to Canadian authorities that an American was running a fishing camp without paying the appropriate fees and taxes. From then on, the Prince Rupert Canadian customs office hassled these company employees whenever they entered Canada.

I've had my problems with Canadian customs, so I told Dennis my Canadian customs story. It happened in 1972 when I lived in Michigan. Every three of four months I drove my van full of art to New York City or to New England. Occasionally, I would stop in Canada and try to sell my art or arrange exhibitions at museums and galleries, but most of the time I drove through Canada, because it was shorter than driving around Lake Erie. On one of these trips, in the middle of the night at the Detroit/Windsor tunnel Canadian customs office I was asked, "What's in the portfolio?"

“Art", I said.

The customs agent wanted me to be more exact and so I said, "Silkscreen prints in limited editions."

He couldn't find this in his customs book, to make things easier for him, I said, "They are the same as woodcuts or etching or lithographs."

He found these things in the book and so everything was okay except maybe he should make an inventory sheet, "Just in case". Thinking there wouldn't be any problems, I agreed and we made an inventory list of all my silkscreen prints and their retail value. I drove on to the Buffalo border crossing and exited Canada without any more delays.

Three months later I went through Canada once again at the same border crossing at the same time of night and I got the same customs guy. Wouldn't you know, he remembered me and the art and the inventory list, so once again we did an inventory list and I continued through Ontario and back into the US of A at the Buffalo entry point.

It wasn't too long after this confrontation that I received a letter from some one in Canadian customs who, doing a random audit had found these inventory lists. There wasn't a record of me taking this merchandise out of the country and silkscreen prints were, in fact, different from Iithographs and woodcuts and etchings and there was a customs duty on silkscreen prints even though this is the only kind of art that isn't duty free in Canada.

I wrote, explaining that because I didn't know about the duty and since I hadn't been informed about it at the times I entered Canada, I didn't stop at customs as I was leaving Canada and have an inventory list made, but I had taken these items out of the country, so, they would have to take my word for it and stop bothering me.

A couple weeks later I received an invoice for $2500.00 (Canadian money), which, at the time, was valued higher than US money.

I responded by reminding them it was their mistake that I wasn’t told to have an exit list made and I thus, couldn't be expected to pay duty because of an error they made. I didn’t point out that, even if I did owe this amount, it was an amount almost equal to my annual income and therefore it was uncollectible.

They countered with an offer exactly like the first, only now I had the option of being permanently banned from Canada.

I decided to level with them and I did an audit of all my past Canadian art sales records. I admitted I owed them 240.00 Canadian dollars. I suggested they "get real" and let me pay them what I really owed them. This time I didn't point out that I couldn't have paid this amount even if they agreed to it.

They responded with a letter telling me to pay the whole $2500.00 and they would deduct the $240.00 I
owed them and return the difference to me.

Did you know you can take a gum eraser and carve letters in it in reverse, turning the gum eraser into a rubber stamp? I did this and I returned their letter to them with "I'm Not That Stupid" stamped all over it.

Their next move was to issue a warrant for my arrest and to post it at several border crossings. They were kind enough to send me a list of all the border crossings where this warrant had been posted, so I could continue going into Canada to do business. I just couldn't take the shortcut to the east coast anymore, since this warrant was posted in both Detroit/Windsor and Buffalo.

Back to the South Dakota story, I was thankful for the opportunity to meet Dennis and to catch these fish and for the opportunity to tell my Canadian customs story and to hear his company boat story. I had another really good time, fishing and talking.