Trash fishing, Tom Nardone explains, is a pretty simple exercise. “It’s like regular fishing, only we’re fishing for trash,” he said. Fair enough. The “we” in this case is Nardone and his 12-year-old son Mark, whose idea this was, kinda. Mark wanted his dad to buy a boat, but his dad wanted them to do some good with it, not just be a couple of suburbanite gas-guzzlers zipping around the lakes and rivers of this very boat-intensive region.
And that’s how they came to buy one boat, a tiny inflatable, and then a somewhat larger boat, a center-console Boston Whaler, and birth the competitive sport of trash fishing.
Yes, a sport. Yes, a competition. If bass fishing can be turned into one, with sponsors and endorsements and branded equipment, why not trash fishing? Bass fishing ruins a fish’s day; at the end of a day of trash fishing, the surrounding area is at least a little cleaner.
Saturday was the first outing in the first official trash fishing season. The weather wasn’t perfect, and there wasn’t much turnout at the city’s public boat launch in the Delray neighborhood in southwest Detroit– just the Nardones and three other guys in two other boats. But Tom isn’t bothered by stuff like that.