An IRL Twitch streamer was recording his summertime fishing session on a North Carolina beach when he was approached by an angry bystander, who gave him an earful after showing off a freshly-caught shark to his audience.
Virginia-based fisherman and Coast Guard Austin Hayne is a partnered broadcaster on Twitch, boasting an audience of over 5,000 followers due to his unique live streams that bring viewers along with him for regular fishing outings.
As Captain of a fishing charter business (for which his Twitch stream is officially dedicated to), fishing is Hayne’s life, and he gave viewers a glimpse of that during his May 4 broadcast.
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While engaged in some catch-and-release-style shark fishing, Hayne and his partner pulled up a sand bar shark, but while showing it off in front of the camera, they were approached by an angry beachgoer.
“It’s illegal to do what you’re doing,” the bystander argued as the two released the giant fish back into the water. “Taking them out to take pictures.”
“Yes it is, actually,” she continued when the fisherman said it was perfectly legal. “I work for the f**king… town, so yeah, it actually is illegal. You take ‘em all the way out just to take pictures!”
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“You hear the hatred?” Hayne said to his viewers as he walked away from the scene. “This is live! Do you see this? That’s the problem with catching sharks in the summertime, people do not like it.”
The group continued to argue back and forth as Hayne walked down the beach, even inviting the bystander to call local authorities to discuss the matter.
For those unaware of local fishing laws, Hayne made sure to clarify that it was, in fact, legal to bring sharks up to the shallows for photos, claiming that local police had even joined in his previous broadcast to take pictures.
“It’s completely legal, what we’re doing,” he explained. “We could actually kill those things if we wanted to.”
“We do catch and release, it’s what we practice,” his partner added. “The fish swims away strong.”
Regardless of the morality of the situation, this incident marks yet another instance of streamers getting harangued by angry bystanders — an increasingly common scenario among IRL broadcasters that continues to pervade the real world.