Chris
I think I understand this better now. You are involved with your lake association. They know you. One of the things that cause conflicts to escalate is when the parties do not see each other to talk face to face. The home owners know you and must perceive you to be a nice person. This makes all the difference in the world even if you were to have differing opinions.

3 Representatives from Club A got up and had prepared speeches. They were quite adamant that the ramps were causing the problems and that local homeowners do use the lake on the holiday weekends.

They insisted that NY federations come here because their season is shut down until sometime in June. They repeated this even though when I spoke I stated that NY had changed it’s laws and that was no longer the case.

They used the scare tactics that zebra muscles and invasive plants were going to invade the lake even after I pointed out that part of the water comes from The Housatonic River and there are Zebra muscles upstream. When I tried to point this out that because of the high Calcium levels in the water they will be here it is a question of when not if. Larry Marsicano stated that the lake did not have a lot of calcium except in the New Milford arm which is where they will come in.

I spoke to one of the Club A guys after the meeting last night face to face and contradicted some of his accusations firmly and with out shouting. He is accusing Bass Fisherman of cutting his sail boat free, Throwing his Aluminum chairs into the water off his dock, Throwing beer bottles in the water next to his beach, getting lures snagged on his boat dock. Going to fast he insisted that he could tell that some boats were exceeding the speed limit. On and on. The one point I strongly disagreed with him on is that in 20 years of tournament fishing I have never seen or heard of a Tournament angler drinking a beer in his boat. He also basically stated that it was ok for the Patrol officers to harass tournament fisherman because we were breaking laws and damaging his property. HE was also very upset over some of the meetings that were held in the past and felt that the Fishermen that attended were rude and disrespectful. Hopefully we each went away with a slightly changed point of view.

Mary Ann Carson did ask for a show of hands for support of the bill and there were only four in opposition.

This meeting was taped and should be broadcast on charter Local Cable access in the next couple of weeks