Lawrence Gunther: How North America's Only Blind Competitive Angler Fishes by Feel

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 110 with Lawrence Gunther.

Introducing Lawrence Gunther

Tom Rowland: Welcome to today's podcast. I have a really fantastic guest today. I'm really happy to bring you this story. I came across this gentleman by listening to another podcast. I think it was called Fish Nerds. I listened to one of their episodes, and they had this gentleman on, and I was fascinated by his story. I knew I had to get him on our podcast. This guy has done a tremendous amount of things in Canada, a lot of conservation work, a lot of work with fishing and fishing rights and getting people access, particularly young people, to fishing. He's a competitive angler. He's a well-sponsored angler. He has done lots of other things and has other interests, including competing in triathlons and sailing regattas, whitewater kayaking, whitewater canoeing, all kinds of stuff. Oh, and did I mention that he is completely blind? Yep. He's North America's only blind competitive angler, and that's only a part of Lawrence's story. That is certainly not who defines him or what defines him, because he is an infectiously positive person who is really a go-getter and a goal-setter, and I am really pleased to bring this conversation to you.

Tom Rowland: I have been avoiding telephone conversations. We've done a couple on this podcast, but I've really been avoiding it. I came across this new technology, so I'm really interested to know what you think. This is the first one that we've done with this new technology. If you like it, please send me an email, podcast@saltwaterexperience.com. Because if you guys think that the quality is good, it really opens me up to be able to interview so many more people, because for the most part, most of what I've been doing is face to face. So if you like this, send me an email and let me know that the quality was to your standard, and we will get lots of people on. So stand by for a really fantastic episode with my new friend, Lawrence Gunther.

Tom Rowland: Alright. So I believe that I have Lawrence Gunther on the phone with me.

Lawrence Gunther: I'm here. Yeah.

Tom Rowland: Awesome, man. Well, I'm really excited to talk to you. I have done a little bit of research. I actually listened to you on another podcast. I think it was the Fish Nerds podcast. I was just fascinated by your story, and I really wanted to talk to you. I've kind of avoided telephone interviews because I have not been very happy with the quality that I've gotten over the phone, and I've just started working out a few other things. I finally found this one thing that seems to be a lot better. So I'm very, very excited to be talking to you today, and I just want to hear your story, man. It's so fascinating what you've been able to do. Can you fill us in a little bit?

Going Blind Three Times

Lawrence Gunther: Sure. Well, you know what? Let's get the 800-pound gorilla identified in the room here, in the podcast room. I'm North America's only totally blind professional angler. I'm an outdoor writer, a podcaster, a blogger, a filmmaker, and just an overall fishing nut. So that's where that started. But I've gone blind three times in my life, and it started at age eight. I grew up in a small town. Loved fishing. I have three brothers, and my dad noticed that I was not seeing some of the detail I should be seeing. So they had me tested, and it turns out I was missing my very central vision, the opposite of tunnel vision. I was just missing the central vision. And then I was told that that would never change, that I would always have a lot of peripheral vision, so I never thought about it again. I just kept being a kid.

Lawrence Gunther: I did everything a kid does. I learned how to tie flies. I got into fly fishing in my little streams and rivers near my house. I got my hunting license. A lot of my friends were encouraging me to get a driver's license, but I didn't think that was such a great idea. I did own my own snowmobile, and I fixed up an old '64 Ford pickup truck that I have to admit I did drive around a little bit once in a while. But then, in my twenties, I went blind for my second time, and that was when I had to go to the city to get some education. I went to college and university and all that stuff, and I had to give away my beagle and, no more hunting rabbits. But I went to Toronto, and then I realized that I couldn't see at night anymore when I went outside. Or if I was outside during the day in the winter and I came inside, I couldn't see anything because my eyes wouldn't dilate quick enough, and it was leaving me functionally blind quite often. So I went off and got a guide dog, and I've been using guide dogs ever since. But then in my forties, it spread out to the point where I lost all my vision. So that's where I am now. I'm totally blind. Three different phases in my life of vision loss, and they all were totally different. They all meant totally different things to me and were totally different challenges. And I handled them all in different ways, that's for sure. But I made it through. Made it through.

What a Blind Person Can Do Better

Tom Rowland: Well, you've been able to do some really remarkable things. I'm reading over your bio here. You've competed in over a hundred tournaments, more than twenty top-ten finishes. You do all kinds of documentaries on television. You're a radio host, a podcaster. You write. You do whitewater canoeing, kayak fishing, backwoods camping, alpine and cross-country skiing, scuba diving, competing in triathlons. You have six children. You're a big leader in Canada's conservation. I mean, just on and on and on, including winning a sailing regatta. I would think that it would be quite an understatement for you to say that being blind has impacted your life in a way that you haven't found a way to do the things that you want to do.

Lawrence Gunther: It's an interesting question, because a good day for me is I go through a whole day, and I don't even think about the fact that I'm blind. I get out. I work. I have full-time work. I have all my distractions, my fishing, my family, my podcasts, my writing, all that stuff. I have a great talking computer. My iPhone talks. All the iPhones now talk just by flipping a button. So there's great technology out there, but there's a lot of things I can't do. For sure, there's a lot of things I can't do. I think the challenge to me, though, was to say, what can I do better than sighted people? And that's the challenge, because I'm competitive. I consider myself a competitive person. I grew up with three brothers. They're not going to let me get away with anything.

Lawrence Gunther: So I was being interviewed by this guy who wrote a dictionary of sports that blind people play. And I said, hey, I guess I've got a question for you. What sport can a blind person do better than a sighted person? And he said he had done about seventy different sports so far where blind people participate. And he said the one that was really interesting that he discovered was wrestling. Apparently, blind people make great wrestlers because you never fake them out, they don't get faked out, and you never know where they're going to come from next. They just come at you.

Tom Rowland: Right. Well, that's my sport, wrestling. And I can see that. Because often, when you're wrestling, you're going at it so hard that your eyes are closed or you're just focused on something. Hopefully, as a wrestler, you're not focused on the ceiling, because that means you're getting pinned. But you're going by feel so much. And jujitsu, I think, would be very similar, wrestling and jujitsu, maybe judo, something like that. Anyway, sorry. Didn't mean to interrupt.

Lawrence Gunther: No, but you're right. It's that initial pre-engagement, the faking, that initial grasp. A blind person's big task is to make that initial grasp and then work on it. They're coming at you, and they're not going to get faked out, and all of those tricks that you develop against sighted competition aren't going to work. So I love wrestling too. I enjoyed it a lot in high school. I played some football too. Didn't like that quite so much because the coaches never told me about blockers. I learned that later. But I also thought about fishing. Fishing is something that I was always good at. I do fly fishing, but lately my real love in fishing is vertical fishing, the touch, the feel of the bite, jigs and drop shots and anything where you're really finessing. That's my specialization.

Learning to Fish Blind on the Water

Tom Rowland: And so in the tournaments that you're fishing, is that mostly bass tournaments or walleye tournaments, or what do you do in Canada?

Lawrence Gunther: Bass, walleye, pike, musky, salmon, trout, panfish a little bit. Yeah.

Tom Rowland: So tell me, how does it work? When I told my family I was going to interview this really cool guy, North America's only blind fisherman, their first question was, wow, how does that work? Like, he's going out in a boat? And I was like, well, I'm going to find out. I don't know exactly how it works. So are you boat fishing? Because I saw on your website where you're fishing rivers with your dog, which I was also fascinated by, that you have your guide dog obviously keeping you from going in too far. I don't know how you've trained the dog, but it's really cool what's going on there.

Lawrence Gunther: Well, for wading and shore fishing, I just use one of those telescopic leashes. I attach one end into my waders and the other into the dog. So that way I know I'm never getting too far away from the shore. I always encourage the dog to stay on the shoreline, so I always know where the shore is. I always know I'm within twenty feet of the shore, because that's how long those leashes get. So that's a good tool for me. But let me tell you about the boating thing. I'll go back a little bit. I've always had a boat. I always had fishing boats and various boats. Like all of us, we've all had our watercraft and evolved through watercraft. But I had a twelve-foot aluminum boat with an eight-horsepower on it for years. And then I remember going out with my oldest daughter just with the oars, and I knew I was getting pretty low on the vision. And I put my oldest daughter in the front of the boat. She was five years old. And we were on a gut, sort of where the river opens up and goes into the ocean, out in Nova Scotia. And I rowed out from land, and for two days I'd taught my daughter left and right. So I would say, okay, you tell me left or right, sweetie. And it was pretty obvious that that was not going to work. She could not tell me left or right fast enough or in any way to keep me going in a straight line.

Tom Rowland: Right. You're rowing that boat with a pair of oars. Of course, often you're rowing backwards, so that's another thing. Okay, which way is left?

Lawrence Gunther: With the left arm. No, the other left. And then she'd say, the other left, Dad. The other other, and then she'd get all confused. And then the boat's spinning around out there like a cork, and the wind's taking us away. And I'm thinking, oh man, we're going to get blown out into the ocean. And then I stopped rowing, and I got my daughter to just quiet down. And I said, okay sweetie, just listen. And I listened to the shore. In front of my cabin, I'd planted all these pine trees. And the pine trees made a specific noise in the wind. It was more like a soft sort of whoosh noise. And all around the shore, it was mostly poplar and birch trees, which rattle like crazy. They make a very loud noise with the leaves. So I listened to the shoreline for the spot where there was no noise. And then I just rowed towards that dead spot of sound, and that was back to our property again, back to our shoreline. And then I got out, and I told my daughter, I said, don't tell mommy.

Tom Rowland: How'd the trip go? Oh, it's great.

Lawrence Gunther: Yeah. I'm never doing that again. But it got me really focused on, okay, I really need technology. So I started bugging this Canadian technology company to build me a GPS system that I could use as a blind person, and they did. And it wasn't just for me. They marketed this and they sold it. But I got the first copy, and I could make a waypoint. And then it would give me directions, you know, one o'clock, 212 meters. I'd create my points, and then I could navigate from point to point to point. So then I got myself a little plastic Porta-Bote. They're made in California. They're these folding boats. They weigh about seventy pounds. And I put an electric motor on it, a little torpedo, and I put some reverse sensors I bought at the auto body shop, the kind you put on your bumpers and they beep at different rates. And I put those on the front, and I put some other sensors on. And I got a talking depth sounder that a guy made me in Australia. And I cobbled together this talking, beeping, audio boat with an electric motor, and I just started using that. And I said, wow, I can go fishing again. I can get out on my own again and go fishing in my little electric boat.

Tom Rowland: That's awesome.

Lawrence Gunther: Yeah. Listen, I still do it, and I still have it. And a buddy of mine said, you should blog about that. This is going back about twelve, thirteen years, so I started blogging. The website's still up, blindfishingboat.com. I leave it up even though I quickly learned two things. One is that there's a lot of weird people out there that are losing their eyesight and they want to drive around big boats. And I have to discourage them and have no connection with them whatsoever, because they're just a death trap on the water. And the other thing I noticed is that the media loved that story. They loved that blind fishing boat story. People loved that story. But I realized it's a story you cover once, and you never cover it again. So from a blogging perspective, from trying to monetize that little blind fishing boat, it really had a big splash, but not a whole lot of carry-through. And that was fine. I was fine just to let it go quiet and just answer questions. I do get a lot of emails from family members and friends of people who are going blind saying, hey, my dad's going blind, he wants to sell his bass boat, or just questions about how to fish blind. So I get a lot of those questions. I love answering that stuff.

Becoming One of Canada's Best-Sponsored Anglers

Lawrence Gunther: But I also said, you know what? I don't want to be just known as the guy who fishes blind by himself. I'm a pretty good angler, and I always did well in tournaments. So some sponsors approached me and said, Lawrence, if you go tournament fishing more, we'll sponsor you. Now I'm one of the top ten best-sponsored anglers in Canada. It's crazy.

Tom Rowland: There's something a blind angler does better than a sighted angler. Oh, I'm sorry. I think a lot of that doesn't have anything to do with being blind. It probably has to do with being a quality person and follow-through and doing what you say you're going to do, probably more often than not.

Lawrence Gunther: That's exactly it, Tom. Because I realized that if I approached a sponsor and said, hey, this is who I am, this is what I do, the first reaction from a lot of them was to just want to give me a few baubles and pat me on the head and say, there you go, blind man, here's a little charity for you. And then I would turn those baubles into a full-blown six-month report on all the media attention I got them, all the activity I've done, the full pro-staff report that you give to your sponsors of all the outreach you've done on their behalf. And so I was able to turn those little charity donations into full-blown contracts. And I sign contracts now every year. I sign a lot of contracts with Ranger Boats, Evinrude Motors, Shimano, Lowrance, Navionics, some of the premier fishing and marine industry leaders. Eagle Claw. Because they love my reports. They love the exposure I get them. And I work hard. I work damn hard.

Tom Rowland: That's what it takes. There is no question. A lot of people, I guess that's probably one of the most common questions I've ever received: I've won a couple of tournaments now, how do I get sponsored? And it's like, well, winning a tournament doesn't have anything to do with being sponsored. That's the thing a lot of people don't quite get, that you really need to be doing what you're doing. That is, reaching out, the outreach on behalf of the sponsor, and then reporting back to them why it's worth their while to be associated with you. You could write a book on that right there. You've obviously done a very good job of it.

Lawrence Gunther: You have to bring them value, way more value than they bring you. And if you do it, you have sponsors for your career, and that's the main thing. Because switching sponsors, from one boat company to another, one marine engine company to another, it's a death trap for a lot of people, because you lose loyalty. Your brand gets confused, because you are who your brands are. Your identity gets totally wrapped up in your branding.

The Fishing Rod as a White Cane

Lawrence Gunther: But I have to admit, if you're going to be a good angler and finish top ten all the time, there's something good anglers know, and that's they know how to fish blind like I do. They know how to feel the bite like I do. Good fishing rods are really nothing more than souped-up white canes. That's what I call them. It's a white cane with a reel strapped to one end and some guides tied onto it. It's a sensing stick. A fishing rod is for launching lures. It's for fighting fish. But ninety-nine percent of the time, you're using it as a sensing tool. It's for you to give information to your hand of what's going on out there. And good anglers know that, and they use their fishing rods as white canes when they're fishing to feel what's going on. They have it in the bag over me, though, because they can see. They can see their chart plotters, and they can see where the birds are. There's those indicators.

Tom Rowland: But when it comes to just feeling, we have an expression in the Florida Keys that when we're doing certain types of fishing and the client's asking how to set the hook, you say, well, we're just going to let Rodney handle that. And they say, who's Rodney? And Rodney's right here, and you put the rod in the rod holder. And you say, you wait until that rod bends over, like for trimming for bonefish, for example. The bonefish comes up, and a lot of times you have little fish nipping, nibbling at the bait, pulling on it. And people set the hook. Well, it messes up the whole thing, because all those little fish are around the shrimp, and they're nipping at it, and somebody goes to set the hook. Now you've moved the shrimp or pulled it off the hook. Whereas if you had let it sit there, then a bonefish comes up and eats the whole thing and then takes off, and mission accomplished. Rodney's the best at that. So oftentimes, if you see the rod bouncing a little bit, that might not be the best thing for that particular situation. And I think what you're talking about too is vertical fishing, drop-shotting. We do a lot of it in the Florida Keys where you're vertical jigging for tuna and stuff like that. It's a little different, a lot more aggressive than drop-shotting for a bass, but there's no sight involved at all.

Lawrence Gunther: Yeah. And sometimes you're right, sometimes the slack line is better than a tight line. Sometimes you have to forego the need to feel. I won a big pier fishing competition against 500 competitors in North Carolina simply because I stayed on the side of the pier where the wind was the strongest and didn't turn my back to the cold wind. And I also kept my line slack. Because fish don't like resistance. They don't understand there's a two-hundred-pound guy at the end of a tight line when they go to bite a little piece of shrimp. They don't want to feel that.

Tom Rowland: A jerk on one end, right? That's what they say. I love it. Never heard that. That's good.

Lawrence Gunther: But they want to feel that natural slackness. They want to see the baits tumbling in the current and acting totally natural. And if you tighten the line, it doesn't show that. So sometimes you just have to let it go slack and let nature take its course.

Tournament Fishing with a Team of Captains

Tom Rowland: I just love that you've been able to develop this and get back to what you really like to do, and then you've developed it into something you're taking a step further. But I still am a little bit uncertain about, if you're at a fishing tournament, there's fifty boats in there and it's a shotgun start. What does that look like?

Lawrence Gunther: So, I don't compete in my little plastic folding boat that much. I do some kayak tournaments. I do a little bit of fishing in that plastic boat, mostly with my kids. I go fishing with the kids and take them. I have a Ranger 620 Fisherman that I use for tournament fishing, and then I have partners. So I have a partner who does walleye fishing with me. I have a partner who does bass fishing with me. I have a partner who does salmon, another partner who does musky. They're all my captains. So they drive my boat. They drive my truck. Sometimes, when we load the boat on the trailer, if the water's really cold, I'll get in the truck and pull the boat and trailer out of the water so the guy doesn't have to get out of the boat. I don't drive too far through the boat line. It's maybe twenty, thirty feet.

Lawrence Gunther: When I got my last truck, Tom, I had all these sensors installed on the front and back bumpers. And my wife gets into the truck and she goes, what the hell's all that noise? And I said, oh, sensors I had installed, and none of them worked properly. They were going off at all the wrong times. And she got so pissed off at me. She said, you've got to get those things removed. Why'd you get those on? I said, well, so I could drive the truck, just move it around in the driveway.

Tom Rowland: How'd that go over?

Lawrence Gunther: That well. They all came out.

Tom Rowland: That's funny.

Visualizing the Underwater World

Tom Rowland: So I'm very interested, because I really get a sense from you that just being able to compete in some tournaments and being top ten or having lots of sponsorship, that's not enough, and you want to do more with your life, with your career, with this situation that you've found yourself in. And I noticed on your bio it said something about motivational speaking and speaking engagements, and you're obviously a very charismatic speaker. How are you using this situation to help others or to speak and touch more people with your story?

Lawrence Gunther: That's a good question, because it's something I ask myself too. I said, if I'm going to be a tournament angler, you really have to do all the pre-fishing. A week of pre-fishing, because otherwise you can't just show up and go fishing on tournament day and expect to do well. There's too many people out there that are really dedicating their time and their energy and making it their full and total focus. And if you're not going to do it properly, don't do it. You're wasting your money, you're wasting your time. So I love tournament fishing. I still do about ten tournaments a year, but they're mostly charity events and fun events now. And I don't plan my year around the tournaments anymore. I plan my year around the things I want to do and then fit the tournaments around that.

Lawrence Gunther: And what I decided to do, again, was to answer that question: what can a blind person do better than a sighted person? And I came to the understanding that when I wake up in the morning and I open my no-good eyes and I'm lying in bed thinking, where the hell are my socks? Like everybody. I visualize my room. I feel around, find my socks. I visualize my room. I visualize my house. I visualize my neighborhood. I visualize all the rivers and lakes around my community within a hundred miles. And I go further. I take that visualization skill now, and through scuba and through my fishing, I visualize the underwater world the same way. And I think that's where I want to go, and that's where I've been going for the last number of years, is trying to encourage other people to use those visualization skills — we all have them — to start to understand that beneath the waves, beneath the surface of our lakes and rivers and oceans, there's a whole other world under there that we need to connect with and understand and believe in. And we don't need to dismiss it just because it's out of sight, out of mind. You've got to believe it. You've got to imagine it. You've got to visualize it, and we've got to start taking care of it better. Because if what happened to the terrestrial world happened to the underwater world, people would freak out. The changes that happen to our underwater ecosystems, that we influence through our stupidity, our naivete, are just astonishing.

Lawrence Gunther: And I'm talking invasive species like in the Great Lakes. A hundred and eighty-five invasive species in the Great Lakes now and counting, plants and animals. I'm talking about blue-green algae. I'm talking about the chemicals we dump in. I'm talking about dredging. I'm talking about dams and siltation. There's so many ways we destroy our ecosystems underwater, and we don't think about it. We don't visualize it. And if we want fishing to be around and we want this resource to be around, we need to all start to paint those pictures in our mind very clearly and start to share the love and knowledge of those worlds with other people so that they too will connect with that. And I think that's my raison d'être. That's my goal. That's why I started the charity Blue Fish Canada. That's most of my filming work now, my documentary. My other filming and my speaking is really to just encourage and inspire people to become stewards of their fishing holes, of their waters.

Reaching Beyond Anglers

Tom Rowland: Are you planning on trying to push that out beyond anglers? Because it's one thing to get anglers to be like, oh yeah, I guess we ought to be paying a little more attention to this, because what if I couldn't fish? Oh, that'd be terrible. So you can really get some point across like that. But what about somebody that — I mean, we're really encountering these issues in Florida. I'm sure you're aware. We have this Lake Okeechobee situation, and there's effluent flowing out into the ocean, and it causes all kinds of problems. It blows up into these algae blooms. We have Captains For Clean Water, an organization that's been doing a tremendous amount for the future of this situation, and public education is a big thing. And public education is one thing when a bunch of dead fish are washing up on the beach. Then people are like, whoa, boy, I don't want this. What we're all understanding now is that if you really want to have an impact, it's one thing to talk to fishermen. It's one thing to talk to bird watchers. It's one thing to talk to the people that are out there. Of course, they're going to be your easiest audience. They can see and smell and feel the beauty of this place. They don't want it to go bad. But what about the other people? The people that live in the cities, the people that don't go fishing. What's your plan to reach them?

Lawrence Gunther: It's not easy, because you have a lot of water activist organizations at the other end of the spectrum. You talk about the anglers, the fishers, the outdoors people. For sure, there's that end. The people who harvest, who partake, who are on the water hundreds of days a year, whose life and hobbies and interest and passion is totally rolled up in the water and the ecosystems and their survival. At the other end, you have these water activists or environmental groups that can go totally in the other direction, where they don't want anyone to touch anything, where it's all got to be naturalized and protected and preserved and prohibited and kept free of any sort of human contact. And I don't think that's the right answer either. So I'm walking down the middle here. Sometimes the environmental groups are okay with what we do as a charity. We believe in harvesting sustainably and catch and release both. And some environmental groups are okay with that, and many aren't. I've been told many times that I'll never get a grant from that organization or funding from that foundation because it's hook and line, and they'll never do it. And that's fine. But you know what? You guys are missing out on that.

Lawrence Gunther: And then I hear some of these ultra-right-wing outdoor organizations that say it's our God-given right to hunt and fish as much as we want and to harvest, and no one's got a right to step in our way, and there's no climate change ever happening, it's just a natural cycle. So there's those two extremes, and you're never going to convince those people to believe anything. But there's a whole silent majority in the middle. The guy and the gal who went fishing with their grandpa or grandma as a kid. Now they've got grandkids, and they're thinking, I want to do this with my grandkids, but I don't want to teach them the wrong way. I don't want to teach them something that my grandchildren are going to say to me, grandpa or grandma, why are you doing that? You're hurting the fish, or you're going to destroy the environment. So it's those people that want to be educated. They say, hey, I want to teach my kid to fish, and I want to teach them to fish the right way, the responsible way, the sustainable way. And it's those young people who have caught their first fish under the dock, and now they've got the passion for fishing, and they want to grow up and be able to hold their head high and counter any resistance from their friends or schoolmates who say, oh, you're murdering fish, you're torturing fish. And they can say no, and they can be factually clear to those people about why what they're doing is a sustainable activity, a supportable activity, a tradition, a way of connecting and maintaining a connection with nature that's profound. So these young people want that knowledge, and the trainers, the mentors want this knowledge. There's this whole majority of middle-road people that have this passion, this sense of tradition, this sense of heritage, and they want to keep that rolling. They want to keep that alive, and they want to make sure they're doing it right.

Tom Rowland: Those are your warriors. Those are the people that are really going to be able to move the needle. I don't know how it is in Canada, but in the United States, we have basically self-levied taxes on hunting and fishing equipment that go back to the resource and employing game wardens and all sorts of things where so many of these other groups don't put a penny towards the environment. And I have never believed that keeping people out is the solution. Because it might work for a little while, but then you see young kids growing up with no connection whatsoever to the outdoors. So why do they even care? Why would they care what's going on out there? Why would they care about what they flushed down the toilet or what they put down the sink? They're never going to see it. They're just going to live right there in that city. And I think those are the hardest people to get through to, the people that have zero connection to it at all. But experience is the key, and education. Let people see how beautiful it is. Let people experience the way they feel after being in the woods for a weekend, and then you understand the importance of wild lands, wild things, and our ability and rights to experience that.

Urban Fishing Nodes and Kids in Nature

Lawrence Gunther: Your point about urban kids is so right on. One of the things we're doing with our charity, we've got grants now, and we're working with different municipalities to create urban fishing nodes. So where you have a body of water passing through an urban community, and you see a bicycle path or a jogging path following that shoreline, but then you see ten feet of the meanest riprap, that barrier between the path and the shoreline that no one in their right mind would dare cross over without risking a break to their leg or a twist to their ankle. So it's off limits. So what we're doing is saying, let's naturalize a piece of the shoreline with some boulders, with some paths, with some trees. Let's extend that naturalized space into the water itself to create habitat for fish, and let's make it accessible. Let's make it well lit. Let's make it a place where urban kids could just walk into the water and get their sneakers wet. Like every other kid did growing up in the country, in the small towns. They just went fishing in their sneakers, and they came home with their shoes wrecked, and every kid —

Tom Rowland: Whether they were fishing, or sometimes they were just throwing rocks. Whatever. They were on the side of that pond or that body of water experiencing nature.

Lawrence Gunther: Catching frogs, chasing dragonflies, all of that. Learning that synergy where land and water meet, and that intensity of life happens at that little strip of shoreline. There's so much life. There's so much diversity right there. It's a magnet for children. Absolute magnet. They should have the experience to go in there with their sticks and their little fishing rods and sample and explore and connect. That's profoundly life-changing.

Tom Rowland: Absolutely. How is it going with trying to create these? Well, first, let's talk about your charity. So it's called Blue Fish Canada. Is that what it is?

Lawrence Gunther: Yeah. The water and the fish. You've got to think of both. You can't just think of one without the other. If the habitat is ruined, the water's ruined, the fish are gone. If the fish are gone, the water is just water for drinking then, or swimming. So you've got to look at both. So that's what we're doing there.

Tom Rowland: Okay. So then you're proposing things like creating paths to these bodies of water like we just discussed, or improving the path, or creating a park-like environment there and inviting kids to use it. How's that going with the state, local, provincial governments, whatever you're dealing with? Is that being accepted?

Lawrence Gunther: City planners and social workers and community workers understand that kids are spending way too much time behind screens, shiny tech, and they need to get back out and connect with nature. So any way to get kids to connect with nature, even if it does involve a hook and line, it's better than no connection. So they get it. And you know what? Most people have had experience fishing. They've had it as a child with their grandparent, and they remember the love, the good time, the good feelings they had from that. So there's a lot of support. It's to overcome those pot-bangers sometimes, the ones that are saying — you know, the PETA kind of activists — no fishing, no hunting, no harvesting, veganism is the way to go. But those people are a minority. They always have been a minority. Vegetarians and vegans make up about twelve percent of the population, and that hasn't changed for forty, fifty years. And I'm not saying eating vegetables more often is wrong, but that's not the same thing as what we're talking about here. We're talking about connecting with nature. Go way back in the Bible, two thousand years, what were they doing? Fishing. And go back thousands of years before that, what were we doing? We were crawling out of the ocean, crawling out of the seas, and we were always gathering along the shore. It's part of our DNA. And there's a lot of very smart psychiatrists and psychologists now who believe it's so ingrained in our DNA to have this experience of connecting with shorelines and marine life that if you deny a child that, you're actually preventing the full development of their personality.

Tom Rowland: I can believe that. In my case, I spent a lot of time sitting on a dock by the Tennessee River just fishing by myself, catching nothing. Every now and then I'd catch something, I guess. But the amount of hours I spent there compared to the number of fish caught was a horrible ratio. But that was a big, huge part of my growing up, and a huge part of my development. It was a huge part of who I became later, unknowingly, being drawn back to the water, wanting to be outside and experiencing fishing and hunting, camping, backpacking, just being outside. I think that is spot on what you just said, that when you deny that to someone growing up, that cannot be good for their development.

Fish as a Renewable Resource

Lawrence Gunther: Nope, it's not. And if you look at fish as a resource — in the United States I think it's a little more evolved than we have it in Canada, and hats off to you guys. I look at what you're doing with your National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Marine Fisheries, and how you're rebuilding your fish stocks around the oceans there and your coastlines, and it's amazing. Absolutely amazing. The United States is a leader in the world in rebuilding fish stocks and managing fish stocks using science and science-based management practices. Fantastic. But it's a resource. It's like Christmas trees. You plant them, you grow them, you harvest them. If it's done properly, it's totally sustainable. And kids understand that. It's not rocket science to them that this is a renewable resource that can be harvested or can be catch and release. There's no reason it can't be both.

Tom Rowland: Right. One of the things you just said is, I think, one of the reasons why conservation or rebuilding fish stocks or setting certain limits or laws, or even in city planning setting green spaces, one of the reasons a lot of that is often accepted and encouraged in the United States, I think, is because one of the things a lot of the groups are very good at is drawing a financial line. For the state of Florida, for example, fishing tourism, bird-watching tourism is responsible for — I don't know the number, but it is a staggering amount of dollars. So it's like, if we can improve the fishing, this number goes up for everyone, not fishing guides alone, but hotels and restaurants and the city itself. Lots of people come to certain areas to fish, and I'm sure it's the same in Canada. Are you doing some of that kind of discussion with these city planners and other people when you're talking about these renovations to some of the bodies of water and allowing fishing or more access? Certainly that in turn lends itself to a better place to live. The real estate values go up. Just a more agreeable place.

Lawrence Gunther: I've got two answers. One is the whole tournament series. I go down in the States, and I go to the American side of the Saint Lawrence River where they're having a lot of the BASS and other tournaments. And you see a hundred thousand people show up, and you see whole festivals and carnivals, and the whole community is involved. It's a full-blown tourism operation, and it's a huge injection into the community of resources, of capital. And then you see on the Canadian side, they can barely get a permit to get the boats launched at the boat launch, and then there's resistance. And you don't even see anyone showing up with a hot dog truck. It's ridiculous. Absolutely complete reverse. People think it's a scourge almost that you have these bass anglers showing up at their shoreline. So we've got a lot of education to do with that. We're working with a lot of tournament organizers to certify them as sustainable through Blue Fish Canada — the practices, the principles — and we're helping promote. We're saying, look, scientists love these tournaments, because it's a great place to gather data. It's catch and release. It's economic sustainability. It's economic infusion into the community. There's a lot of bonuses that go along with these tournaments. So that's my answer to that.

Crewing on a Cod Boat and the Collapse of the Fishery

Lawrence Gunther: I have to go back a bit in time. When I was doing my university studies and college, they didn't have a lot of talking computers back then. They didn't have a lot of talking technology of any sort, and my employment opportunities were pretty limited. I was approached by the president of the Blind Piano Tuners Union, and I was offered an apprenticeship to become a blind piano tuner. And that was one of the very few professions back then that a blind person could actually make a living from. And I thought, wow, that's pretty sucky, because I hate pianos. Well, or they hate me. Let's put it that way. But what I did do is I bought a little cabin out on the East Coast of Canada, for very little money, and I convinced some local fishers to take me cod fishing in their homemade wooden boats with their car engines in them and their compass and their little VHF radio, and that was it. And finally they agreed, and we had a great day. We caught, I think the first day I went out, we caught 2,300 pounds of cod on handlines, just three of us jigging handlines. And it was a great day. We made some good money. They made eight hundred dollars. And I got my ten percent share of the take that day, and I was invited to come back. And I was made crew. And I did that for the next seven years. I crewed every summer on that cod fishing boat with the father and son there in their homemade boat. And they would even let me drive the boat back, because they didn't want me to use the fillet knives and cut myself. So they'd have me drive back.

Lawrence Gunther: And I couldn't see the compass. I could see a little bit back then still. So I could see that when we were driving back west at the end of the day into the sun, the windshield had a wooden two-by-two sort of separating the two pieces of glass. And that two-by-two piece of wood would shine this big black shadow across the dashboard. And I would just say, keep it lit up, and I'll look at that shadow, and I'll keep that shadow on that spot on the dashboard. And I'd get to drive home two, three hours at the end of every day. I loved it. Absolutely loved it. And they would just give me a course correction every half hour or so, or yell at me, slow down, we've got to get some buckets of water out. They'd be cleaning the catch at the back, and I just got to drive. But I loved that. And then in 1992, it was gone. All the cod were gone. And I said, I'm a good angler, I'm good at fishing, but I didn't take them all out of there. Something happened to them. And it sparked my interest, and I realized that you can have these communities. These people did this for five hundred years, Tom. Five hundred years in their homemade wooden boats. They went out off these rocky shorelines, harvested cod, brought them back, sold them. Their daughters and wives would work in the cleaning plants where the fish would be processed and filleted and cleaned and packed on ice and shipped out. It was a full-blown experience for the whole family, and it went back generations. And then these big, massive factory trawlers showed up in the eighties and just wiped it out. Literally wiped it out in ten years. Absolutely destroyed the cod fishery in ten years. A five-hundred-year-old fishery was wiped out in ten years. And that's what we need to remember, that you can have these communities on these shorelines that can have sustainable economic activity that can support families for multiple generations if you do it right. But you've got to stand up for your resource, and you've got to be counted. And we're learning how to count all these individual boats and individual hotels and individual homes. We never used to know how to count it. We just counted a big boat and the fact that it caught ten thousand pounds of fish every day. That was easy to count. We're good at that. But we didn't know how to count the cost to the community, and now we do.

Tom Rowland: So let me ask you about that cod boat. Those big cod boats that come in, what was the method of fishing? Was it netting or hook and line, or how were they catching their fish?

Lawrence Gunther: It wasn't seining. The local guys bought into the seiners. A seiner is where you would go out, find a school of fish, and then drop a net, circle the school, tighten up the net at the bottom like a big purse. Tighten the bottom of the net, and then haul the whole thing aboard and dump it onto your deck, undo the bottom, dump it out, and process the fish. That was a little more sustainable, because you could be selective. But what these big factory trawlers were doing is they were trawlers. So they would drag these nets, and quite often drag them along the ocean bottom, and then they would have ticklers, which were wheels with chains that would roll along the bottom and slap the bottom with the chain. So any fish that was lying on the bottom trying to duck would be spooked up, jump up, and go up into the net. But it would destroy the bottom of the ocean floor. It would tear everything to shreds. All the sea life down there was just absolutely destroyed and mangled, and then it scooped everything up into these nets and brought the nets to the surface. Everything was packed in the back of the nets, compressed. Nothing survived. It was barotrauma. All the swim bladders were extended. And just the fact that it was all compacted. So they would just pick out the fish they wanted to keep and throw everything else overboard. It was just dead. Sixty percent bycatch of just dead stuff going over the side.

Tom Rowland: No wonder that really took a toll on that fishery so quickly. Because now you're getting fish of all sizes. You're getting all the bait fish. You're getting everything. You're just killing everything. It's so often what we've seen, and it's an unfortunate situation when it happens, is the gear changes. And what has been a sustainable fishery for a long time, all of a sudden is not when the gear changes. And this is something very difficult to get a nonfishing person to understand. It's like, look, you go out there and hand-line cod for ten hours and tell me how you feel. And tell me if you think you can catch everyone in the ocean, because your hands are going to be beat up. You're going to be sore, tired. And guess what? You've got to get up and do it again the next day. So at some point, no matter how great the fish are biting, a human body just can't do any more. It goes the same for our commercial yellowtail fishing, when they're catching tuna on the cane poles, where it's a human body pulling these fish in one by one on a hook. I don't think you're going to take them all. I really don't. And you compare that to that operation you just talked about, these giant boats with these things hitting the bottom and huge nets. And so to a nonfishing person, a lot of times they're like, well, fishing's fishing, and look, this is what happened here, they fished it out. It's like, yeah, but that's a lot different than hand-lining. A lot different.

Lawrence Gunther: It's a lot different, but I think we were all painted with the same brush. In the eighties and nineties, when we wiped out so many fisheries around North America and around the world — and we're still doing it — I think all anglers got tainted with that brush and still are. I read reports from the World Wildlife Fund, and they just say fishing is destroying the environment. And I said, well, hang on. You can't just say fishing, because you're lumping us all together, and that's not fair. And you can't say what's happening in the United States and Canada is the same as what's happening off the coast of Africa. It's totally different. So let's be accurate here, and let's not be scaremongering, and let's not be painting everyone with the same brush. So I think anglers need to understand the difference, and they need to be able to step up and say, you know what, what we're doing around stocking, around catch and release, around limiting harvest, around not fishing during spawns, about having some marine protection areas where it's needed, we're actually growing our resource.

License Fees, Wetlands, and Who Actually Shows Up

Tom Rowland: How about license fees and actual money returning to fund these types of projects and to fund the law enforcement necessary to make sure that people are abiding by the laws that are there for a reason, and everybody's safe and happy? I often bring it back to a financial thing, because that's what people tend to understand. It's like, if hunters and fishermen weren't putting this money into it, if Ducks Unlimited hadn't done their big push a long time ago about preserving wetlands, then there'd be a strip mall everywhere. We would have just drained every swamp and built a mall. That's all hunting and fishing.

Lawrence Gunther: Yep. And it's cheap land. Wetland is cheap land. You can buy it for next to nothing. And what developer doesn't want to take something that's almost worthless to them and make a lot of money out of it? And not to mention the amount of hours that anglers put into wetland restoration and shoreline restoration and spawning habitat restoration. We put in more volunteer hours as anglers in those types of activities than all other groups combined. All other groups. We're out there actually doing it. You do a call for action in any community, say, hey, we want to plant new trees and brush along the shoreline, can we get some volunteers? You'll have all the angler groups showing up to volunteer. You have to turn them away almost.

Tom Rowland: And you'll have zero antis.

Lawrence Gunther: Oh yeah. You won't see many of them. You won't see many of them.

Tom Rowland: That's been my experience so far, that there's a lot of people that want to just complain and be anti-something, and they're not the ones that are helping the cause at all. That to me doesn't do anything. What does something is moving forward, like what you've been able to do with your organization.

Staying Positive Against the Doomsday Clock

Tom Rowland: And it kind of makes me want to ask you a couple other questions tangential to what we've been talking about. You tend to have a really positive outlook on everything. You're consistent with the last podcast I heard you on, with all the different articles I'm reading. You're doing this going up against a lot of these groups you're talking about and encountering resistance there. And then not to mention the hand that you've been dealt. How do you remain so optimistic?

Lawrence Gunther: I like to surround myself with positive people, and I like to be a positive person. I think negative energy makes more negative energy. Fish, like sharks, have those sensors in their heads where they can feel the electric pulses of the muscles of the animals they're chasing through the ocean. I think we can feel energy too. I don't have little pods of nerve endings under my skin like a shark does, not that I know of. But somewhere, somehow, like the hair standing up on the back of your neck, we feel negative energy, and it impacts us. I like to be around people that are positive. I also think these anti groups that are always screaming that the sky is falling, that the world is coming to an end, that the doomsday clock is about to tick down to one minute, trying to scare the crap out of everybody — unfortunately, there's a few very rich people who have been scared badly and have donated huge checks to these groups, and it's fueled all the rest of them to bang the pots even harder with the hope that they'll get one of those big checks too. But I think what the public wants is to be inspired, and they want to know there's a possibility of doing something. It's like recycling. Instead of dropping the can into the garbage pail, you drop it in the recycling bin. What else can I do? Hey, that wasn't so hard. What else can I do? And if we can give people those options and say, look, you could do this, and you could do this, it's not a big deal, but every little bit helps — people want to do that. They don't want to be scared to death anymore. We all understand the climate is changing in not great ways, but what are we going to do about it? How can we roll up our sleeves and do something about it? People are looking for those types of solutions that they can get on board with. And by featuring people — I try to do that with my podcast, Blue Fish Radio — featuring champions who are out there doing cool stuff, doing cool research, being cool citizen scientists, supporting various activities, building the resource, building that sense of responsibility, respect, and encouraging young people to get involved. Those are great stories. Especially now, I think there's a lot of people around climate change in the public that have what I call pre-traumatic stress syndrome. They hear of climate news, and they just shut off. They just shut the news off. They don't want to hear more of that, because it scares them. It scares me. It makes me unhappy. It makes me depressed. I don't want to hear all the time that the world's coming to an end. I want to hear, what can I do about it? What's being done about it? I want to have some optimism, some positive ideas.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. That's awesome, man. And so often I tend to turn that news off myself, not because I don't want to hear what's going on or try to figure out a way I could do something, but it's just that one side's using that argument for their own agenda, and so is the other side. And it just turns into something it was never meant to be. It was supposed to be a news story about some icebergs melting or something, and now it's something far different. And it's just a bunch of people yelling and screaming at one another, pointing fingers. I don't see that that does anything for me personally, so I tend to turn it off as well. I'm not signing up for that, just like you. I don't want any more negativity in my life. I want positive.

Net Givers and the Arctic Storytellers

Tom Rowland: So with your positivity and your optimism and surrounding yourself with these positive people, and you seem to have a lot of directions you'd like to go in your life, what kind of goals are you setting for yourself, and how are you planning on achieving them?

Lawrence Gunther: I think tournament fishing is like crack cocaine. It's always there. You always want to do it, but you have to say no to yourself. So there's a story I like to tell. A bag of money busts open in the parking lot. It's a windy day. It all starts blowing along. People are scrambling, picking it up, just grabbing money. If you just grab for anything, you'll end up with a fistful of fives. But if you're careful and you're selective, you can just take a couple of hundred-dollar bills out of that windstorm of money and do much better. So it's not about taking all your opportunities. It's about picking an opportunity and doing it well. And I think that's the most important thing, to focus your energy, focus your time. We only end up with so many minutes in a day. We have to spend time sleeping every day. We have to spend time feeding and exercising and staying fit every day. And then we have to find a way to make money every day. And then if we have a little bit of time left, what do we want to fill that time with? So we have to be very careful how we allocate that time and make sure it's allocated in a way where we could develop an expertise, a specialization, something we're good at.

Lawrence Gunther: I go back to the time I spent a lot of time in the Arctic, doing research and living in Northern Sweden and Northern Canada amongst First Nations and Inuit people. And I asked the question, what did you do with your people with disabilities before Europeans came along? I was taught they just put them on icebergs and shoved them out into the ocean. Got rid of them. And you hear stories like that, and they're not necessarily untrue. But my first reaction, and it took me a long time to figure this out, is they always told me they never had people with disabilities, because they never had guns, they never had axes, they never had alcohol, they never had snowmobiles. They never had all the tools that we use to disable ourselves. So they had very low-impact ways of living. But then I kept probing, and I realized that to them, a disability meant you couldn't be a productive member of society anymore. You were a taker. And what they found, when I talked to them, they said, well, I had an uncle who was blind, but he wasn't disabled. He was the storyteller. He had the most important role in the community. No TVs, no internet, no magazines, no radio. Who did you turn to for entertainment on those cold stormy nights? You turned to the storyteller, and the storyteller would tell these amazing stories and pass on the wisdom and the values of society. And they were one of the most important people in their community. And if that was the blind uncle, they provided him with all the food he needed to feed him and his family. Or the blind auntie, the blind grandmother who could chew hides and look after the little ones, and she was totally not handicapped. She was deaf. She couldn't hear anything, but she could sure look after kids and make clothing.

Lawrence Gunther: I think we all need to say to ourselves again — and I think a lot of us have lost this — how am I a net giver? Because it's so easy in today's world to become a net taker, someone who takes more than they give. And if we all take more than we give from society, we're bankrupting society, and you can see that happening. But if we all say, I want to be known as a giver, I want to be really good and recognized as a giver in my specialization, and you become a net giver, you give back more than you take, you're rewarded in so many other ways. And that gets back to this whole thing about being a sponsored angler. If you want to be sponsored, you have to be seen as someone who gives more than they take, and it's totally the case. You have to be a net giver. If you just got out there looking for free baubles, you're going to be viewed as someone who's just out for themselves, and you're not going to get anywhere.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. Man, that's awesome. A net giver. And you know what a net giver really is? It's somebody that gives fifty-one percent. You don't even have to — somebody that's thinking about that and thinking, well, maybe I am a taker, I don't know — you only have to turn it around one percent. Of course, the exceptional givers are giving ninety percent or way more. But really, to be on a positive track in your life, you really need to be giving fifty-one percent. That's a little bit more than you take, and that's awesome. And really, if you had a whole community and everybody's giving fifty-one percent, there's abundance everywhere.

Lawrence Gunther: There is.

Tom Rowland: Of course, you're going to have the people that are exceptional givers, just like exceptional anglers or exceptional whatever they are, and they're going to choose to give way more and dedicate their life to giving. But really, it only takes that one percent, that little bit more than you take, and that results in a very positive track in your life.

Lawrence Gunther: Absolutely right. Some people say, well, I give my taxes, that's enough. And we all pay our taxes, I hope, and those tax monies go to a lot of good uses, schools and health care and everything. But at the personal level, I really think we can do more as individuals if we look after our neighbors, our neighborhoods. If we all care about the people that live beside us a little bit and say, look at that old lady across the road, or the single parent there, how can I help them a little bit, and just give to them a little bit in a way that improves their lot in life a little bit and doesn't take my lot down a significant amount. You can't do that with taxes. You can't do that with government. You can't micromanage efficiently at that level with a big government infrastructure. It's just unwieldy. The cost of the system outweighs the benefit. So that's why we have to take it in our own hands to do that. We can't just pay people to do it for us. We need to do it ourselves and just say, oh, here's someone in need, here's a cause that I believe in, then step up.

A Remarkable Attitude and Kyle Maynard

Tom Rowland: Yeah. Man, I love that. And especially when we're just sitting here talking, the last thing in the world I'm thinking about is that you happen to be a blind person. I'm talking to someone that has this remarkably positive attitude, talking about giving and helping other people. And there's so many people that have zero physical handicaps whatsoever, and they're sitting around asking, why is this all happening to me? Why can't I have what those people have? Just this negativity, this negative attitude, when in fact they have everything they possibly need physically to do anything they would possibly want to do in this lifetime. I have a friend that I had on the show one time. His name is Kyle Maynard. You may know of him. He's a congenital quadriplegic amputee. His arms go just to his elbows. His legs go just past his hips. And Kyle is a remarkable person. I took him fishing. We're out there talking, and I said something about disabilities. And he said, oh, I don't have a disability. And I'm just looking at him, and I'm like, oh yeah? And he goes, no, I don't have a disability. Lots of people have way worse disabilities than me. I mean, negative self-talk, poor confidence. I don't have any of that. I can do anything I want to do. And I was just like, wow, that is so awesome. That is the most incredible thing I've ever heard in my life. But he was totally serious, and we continued to talk about it. He's like, look, man, people have these voices in their head that are just telling them all the time that they can't do this and they can't do that. He's like, not me, man. It might take me forty-five minutes to put on a pair of socks, but I can do it, and I know I can do it.

Lawrence Gunther: You create these worlds. You shape your world, your environment, where you can be successful. And that's the first step, how to create yourself an environment where you can be empowered and where you can be successful. I tell you, you talk about sitting down. If I walk into a room full of strangers, right away people say, oh, come sit down, blind man. And I say, you know what, no, I'm okay. I'm fine. And they said, no, no, please sit down, please sit down. I said, no, I'm fine. And they'll all start pushing me towards the chair. And I'm six foot three and a half, two hundred and ten pounds. I'm not easily pushed. And then their next reaction is, that blind so-and-so, he doesn't even listen, he's a stubborn, blind idiot.

Tom Rowland: You should look at them right then and say, well, I'm deaf too.

Lawrence Gunther: I know they're not saying it, but they're thinking it. And then, once I get them past the point that I'm not helpless and I'm not obtuse, the third thing is they say, Lawrence, what can I do for you? And I say, well, now we're talking. And then I get to take over. My leadership skills rise to the surface. I take these volunteers, these people around me, and I show them, hey, I am blind, and there's things I can't do. There's a few things you could do for me that would be very much appreciated. And in exchange, I will make sure I do for you in ways that more than make up for it. And that gets back to the net-giving thing. If I turned all my friends into slaves where they were always giving and doing for me and got nothing out of it, I'd be a lonely guy. So my friends know that, hey, yeah, Lawrence is blind, and there's things you need to do for him, but man, you hook your wagon to his locomotive, and you're going places.

Fitness, Triathlons, and Fooling the Finish Line

Tom Rowland: Yeah. God, I love it. Hey, one more, a different subject I want to cover before we finish up. I want to know what your relationship is with fitness, how that kind of started and what role it plays in your life.

Lawrence Gunther: I think it's so easy to say to yourself, I can't do that, I'm going to hurt myself. And as a blind person, it's so easy to live in your head where you're just thinking, because you can't see what's going on around you. You're not engaged. You can't go out and play Frisbee. Can't go play catch. Can't go kick the ball around. A hundred things you can't do that are normally just sport-type activity. So I have to make an extra effort to find things I can do. And one thing I love to do is triathlons. It's swimming — I just use a bungee cord, I wrap it around my upper torso and tie it around the waist of my swimming buddy, and we just swim side by side, so I don't veer off course too many times. And then for the bicycle part, we do a tandem bike. I don't get to ride on front. I ride on the back. And then for the running, I just hold their elbow. And it's funny sometimes, because I do this with some of my volunteers at the end, and they don't realize it, but I get a kick out of it. So we're coming into the finish line for the third leg, the running leg. And they're maybe a little tired. And I say, you know what, you've been dragging me around all day, it's my turn to drag you around a little bit. And they say, Lawrence, I'm not dragging you. I say, well, that little bit of help, it helps. I'm holding on to your elbow, it helps. So you hold on to my elbow. So then for the last couple of miles, they'll be holding my elbow, and I'll be out in front of them. And then we come to the finish line, and everyone's cheering my sighted friend thinking they're the blind one. And I just love it. And I'm waving to everybody.

Tom Rowland: That is awesome.

Lawrence Gunther: You've got to have some fun, right?

Tom Rowland: That's awesome. But you have to have some sort of appreciation for fitness. In order to be able to do the triathlon, there's obviously training that goes into it. I saw where it says you walk ten K with your dog every day. And fitness is something that's very important to me and has had a big impact on my life and helps me basically stay sane, I think, more so than anything. I can't imagine a life without it. I think it's better for my brain.

Lawrence Gunther: I love your podcast for promoting that. It's the one-health thing. You've got to keep your nature, your environment healthy, and you've got to be healthy too. You can't just go fishing and be a slob that's half alive going out into the pristine wilderness going, oh, this is beautiful. You can't appreciate it unless you feel fully alive. How can you feel nature, the full life of nature's force, if you're only barely living? So I agree. You've got to get up every morning and start your day with some fitness. I have a little gym, and my rowing machine is my swimming exercise. My treadmill is my running, and I have a bicycle, and then I have some dumbbells. And I have a big open area where I can do all my stretches and my crunches and all the other manual exercises I want to do every day. And I feel so much better doing that every day, because otherwise I could be sitting in front of a computer for ten, twelve hours a day sometimes doing stuff, and that's just like cancer. Computers are like smoking. It'll kill you. Just kill you with all that sitting around.

Technology Invented for Blind People

Tom Rowland: Yeah, there's no question about it. Now, I know that when people hear that, they're like, well, sitting in front of a computer, so how does that work with you? When we first got on the phone, I heard your computer talking to you. You've got a talking computer.

Lawrence Gunther: Yep. I use a keyboard, and I use a software device that articulates everything on my screen. So I know how to touch-type just by feel. I know my keyboard. Actually, the typewriter was originally invented for blind people so they could write, so they could print.

Tom Rowland: I can believe that.

Lawrence Gunther: And then it became mainstream technology for everybody. The tape recorder, that was invented for blind people, and it became mainstream technology for everybody. So there's a lot of technology that was invented for people with disabilities that became mainstream.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. The audiobook. The audiobook, man. What would I do without audiobooks? I wouldn't read anything.

Lawrence Gunther: Yep. Yeah. Sometimes I think the audiobook was a way of keeping blind people quiet, so they wouldn't rise up and rebel. Oh man, I had to turn them off sometimes. I think there must be more to life than these audiobooks. But for a long time, people didn't have a lot of expectations of blind people. There wasn't a very high expectation. I'm hoping that's changing. I don't want to be directly the guy who goes out there and motivates other blind people to do stuff. But I do recognize that I play a role as a bit of a role model. And the image I want to portray is that you can do stuff and you can be really good at it. And it doesn't always have to be about accommodation and affirmative action and all that employment equity stuff. Maybe that's a good way to get a foot in the door, but in the end, you really have to step up and be good at something.

Hard-Ass Advice: You've Got to Have Some Skills

Lawrence Gunther: It's like a lot of blind people approach me and say, hey, I want to go fishing, how do I get someone to take me fishing? And I say, well, do you know how to cast? Do you know how to tie a knot? Do you know how to do the basic things? And no. Well, I said, you can't just be a charity case and expect someone to take you, because people want to go fishing with someone, they don't want to babysit. Most people don't want to get their ass kicked, but they also don't want to do everything for you. So you go fishing with people that can keep up to you. Maybe you can beat them a little bit. Maybe they beat you once in a while, but you've got to have some skills. So step up, learn some of the skills, and then you can hold your own a little bit. You're not going to be just a drain on someone else's resources, where they're going to have to unhook the fish for you and tie on your lures and do everything for you. No one wants to do that twice. I'm a hard-ass.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. Well, but you're speaking from experience, and you're speaking from a place that very few other people can. So the advice that you're giving might sound harsh, and it might be hard-ass advice, but to the blind person that you're giving that advice to, it's the best advice they're probably going to hear if that's really what they want to do.

Lawrence Gunther: Well, someone has to speak the truth sometimes. And it's not always easy to speak the truth to someone who looks so obviously not capable. We all have sympathy and empathy, and that's a good thing. It makes us human when we care. Just don't crush people with your care. That's all.

Tom Rowland: Wow. So if that blind person comes up to you and asks you that, and you say, well, do you know how to cast and do you know how to tie knots, and they say no, but I'd like to, what would the next step be?

Lawrence Gunther: I think if someone's committed to learning, then you could say, look, I want to teach you how to tie a knot. It's like every kid. You learn. You start somewhere, but they have to be committed to learn. And it can't just be a free ride. Unfortunately, it's called secondary gains, where people with disabilities maybe have learned how to manipulate the situation where they get free rides and take advantage of situations because they use their disability card. And they say, hey, I'm disabled, you've got to do this for me, you've got to do that for me. And maybe some of that's legit, but like I said, you have to give back somehow. And there's no reason why people can't get good at things and become good at things. So you have to show some willingness. And if people aren't willing to learn and try harder, then you have to say, look, man, I'll show you this a couple more times, but you really have to figure this out for yourself, because I want to fish too. And just be honest. And how can I help you to help yourself? That's the third piece. How can I help you to help yourself?

Tom Rowland: Right. Wow. That's just the same as parenting, and the same as dealing with people that have all kinds of other things, just like negative self-talk. Disability doesn't just come in the form of physical disability, and that's some really good advice for people that are dealing with friends that are dealing with those other types of disabilities. Like, look, man, sooner or later you've got to step up and do this for yourself. You've got to learn how to deal with your own voices in your head. You've got to learn how to achieve confidence somehow. People are trying to help, but there's only so much anybody's going to do.

Going Blind Is Like Being a Brand New Baby

Lawrence Gunther: When you go blind, slowly or quickly, it's like you're a brand new baby. Only the other thing is, you've got a fully formed conscious mind. So you understand everything around you, but your whole way of living, you have to learn it all over again. You have to learn how to dress yourself, how to feed yourself, how to walk without falling down. It's all the things a baby has to learn to do. And it can take a year or a year and a half to become a fully functioning blind person, where you can get around actively with your white cane or your guide dog, where you could learn to use a computer again, where you can learn to write and read, where you can learn to do all those things, cook in the kitchen, do your laundry, brush your hair, shave yourself, all those things. It can take a year and a half. So there has to be some patience. But if it's going on for year after year, that's where someone needs maybe a bit of a push, for sure. But it's a challenge. And who hasn't undergone a challenge in their life? And we all will. We all will have our setbacks. We all will have our challenges. We'll all have our valleys where we need to push through and overcome. It's life. It's what makes life interesting.

Tom Rowland: Boy, you're right about that. And just about the time you think there aren't any more valleys, here comes a big one. You know what I mean? Boy, yeah. It just always happens. But it always boils down, for the most part, to the mindset, to the attitude that you go into the challenge with. Are you going to lose? Are you going to learn? There's a big difference. You can encounter a challenge or an obstacle, and you can let that thing beat you, or you can choose to learn from it and move on and be better because of it.

Wrapping Up

Tom Rowland: Man, I'll tell you what. This has been a really amazing conversation. I really enjoyed talking with you for so many reasons. I think what you're doing in the fishing world is really cool, and the conservation world, and getting children involved in the sport and just being outside. You're really taking it to a different level. And then to take the conversation to another level, you just have a remarkable attitude, man. It's a pleasure to talk to somebody like you. You just have a really remarkably positive attitude, and that has nothing to do with the fact that you're blind. It has nothing to do with the fact that you're a fisherman. It's just, man, I like talking to people that have such a positive attitude. It's awesome.

Lawrence Gunther: Tom, it means a lot to me coming from someone like you. I've listened to your podcast and witnessed indirectly all the things you've been able to accomplish in your own life. And it's no wonder people tune in to you, sir. You're living the truth, and you're walking the talk. I think examples of people who can stay fit mentally, physically, and overcome challenges and focus in and accomplish their goals and still be able to give back in different ways, and not just become a greedy, annoying person through it all — it's fantastic, and you represent all that. You're not a greedy person. You're giving back with your podcast.

Tom Rowland: Trying, man. Certainly trying. I appreciate that. I really do. I appreciate that very much, and I hope that's the case. I am having fun with it, I can tell you that. And I do enjoy learning, and I do enjoy talking to people like you. So it's been great. Lawrence, I know this will not be the last one. I'd love to do another podcast with you and find out all the stuff that's going on within the Canadian conservation front and just what you're up to, man. Cool dude.

Lawrence Gunther: Let's keep in touch, buddy. Me too.

Tom Rowland: Thank you so much. Oh, wait. Before we go, tell everybody how they get in touch with you, how they hear your podcast, how they listen to Blue Fish Radio, how they can help support any of the things that you're doing.

Lawrence Gunther: Blue Fish Radio is on iTunes and a bunch of the podcast providers. You can go to bluefishradio.com, and you can see all our past episodes there and links to all the shows. Blue Fish Canada is our charity, where we have a bunch of resources that you can download, and tools. We try to keep everything out there as much as possible. And if you want to follow me, it's lawrencegunther.com. Lawrence, like the river, Gunther, G-U-N-T-H-E-R dot com, and on Facebook and Twitter, and getting the Instagram going now. I look at it to learn to take better pictures, though.

Tom Rowland: How do you know?

Lawrence Gunther: My iPhone tells me now. It centers my pictures. It gives me verbal directions on how to center my pictures when I point my iPhone.

Tom Rowland: Well, I'll tell you what. If you leave it up to Apple, soon you're going to be taking better pictures than all of us. Because that company has a way of figuring it all out.

Lawrence Gunther: Oh my god.

Tom Rowland: Oh, yeah. You just let it do its thing. It's probably going to turn out to be better than anything. This podcast is actually the first one that I've done entirely on the iPhone. So it'd be interesting. I hope it turns out great. If so, we'll do a lot more telephone ones. But Lawrence, thank you so much for your time, and thanks for being so open with us on the podcast. We really appreciate it, and all the best to you, sir.

Lawrence Gunther: Same to you, Tom. Appreciate it. Alright. See you.