Snakehead Fishing

The New Yorker goes fishing with anglers looking to catch some of the hated snakehead fish apparently invading the trash-filled waters of Flushing Meadow-Corona Park’s Meadow Lake:

But now the snakehead — the northern snakehead, Channa argus, which is native to Asia — has come to New York City, by what conveyance no one knows. Scientists with the state Department of Environmental Conservation recently netted five of them in Meadow Lake, in Flushing, Queens, during a routine survey. The picture in the paper, of two torpedo-shaped carcasses laid out next to measuring tape, called to mind mug shots of criminals you’ve come to root for. It didn’t take long for a fisherman or two to start trying to think like a snakehead.

“I’m gonna bring some earthworms,” Edwin Valentin, a master flytier at Urban Angler, on Fifth Avenue, said last week, after being persuaded to serve as Quint in a Queens-bound party of three. (Gary Ford, of Fort Greene, furniture-maker and saltwater fisherman, was guy No. 3.) Valentin lives in Bushwick and has been plying these metropolitan waters for more than thirty years. His only experience catching snakeheads is on PlayStation.

Alas, in the end no snakeheads were caught. But they did snag a healthy collection of inorganic detritus:

A halfhearted chumming effort (a doughnut, a fish stick) brought forth no surface activity. Valentin and Ford rigged up. “I’ll try a white grub,” Valentin said, tying on a wormy lure. “Here we go.” He cast into the lake, reeled, then cast again. A bend in the rod indicated a strike: garbage bag, the first of many. The line snapped. In this way, perhaps, the snakeheads, without lifting a pectoral fin, could wipe out the entire population of Valentin’s tackle box.