From my personal, albeit limited, experiences with TWRA, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more laid-back and genuinely helpful group of people, IMO. I've never known one to go out of their way to screw with someone, much less some putz on a jet ski, without feeling as if they had little choice but to do otherwise. Admittedly, this is less than nothing on the radar...but at some point, Bray has to realize that anything he does, however inconsequential it is and would be to most, is going to be exponentially magnified simply because it's him. It's neither "right" not "fair", for sure, but reality.
If I was in the spotlight during my college days, I would've ended up more outcast than Hester Prynne
Reading GVX about this incident makes me want to blow my brains in. Hell, how many college kids don't go have fun on the water. All this talk about suspension and dismissal and Bray is going to cost Dooley his job crap is getting to be intolerable.
That has been my experience as well, but I am a Hunter's Ed instructor. I work with them all the time. I've known one guy that was....difficult. Now if you want to talk coastal SC wildlife officers, we can talk on that subject. I got a warning this summer for no registration for sitting in a boat tied to the dock scooping water out of the boat. It's registered to my bro-in-law, I hadn't run the boat all trip, and my bro-in-law is 50 feet away at the pool with the registration card.
I don't think this is the biggest deal in the world, but I don't understand the hate that the TWRA officer is taking over this.
I don't get it. There have been some TWRA officers that were more than helpful in our run-ins with them.
I've dealt with a lot of game wardens and the overwhelming majority of them are nice. There are a lot of obscure rules you have to follow while owning a boat (who the hell actually keeps a fire extinguisher on a boat?) which I think makes people dislike them. There was one GW that had it out for us because we shot around 45 coots in a day (the limit is 15 per person and there were 4 of us, totally legal). A coot is a trash duck that seems to swim towards loud noises. Well, we didn't pick one up and he read us the riot act for leaving a dead bird in the corn stubble. It was an accident, but he acted like we killed a man and threw him out.
One thing that does **** me off about the TWRA is the fact an Arkansas state trooper let Dyer go with a bag of weed and a pistol with a warning while they write Bray a ticket for riding a jet ski.
