“He’s got a grip like I’ve never seen,” Major Fishing League President Boyd Duckett said. “I have seen him catch a 10-pound bass with his bare hands.”

Most could assume Duckett’s statement was about famous fisher Kevin VanDam, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Nobody could have expected English teacher Matt Barker to hand in his notice after a video of him fishing a student’s vape out of the toilet went viral.

“I realized I had a higher calling,” Barker said in an interview with The Daily Mail. “I didn’t want to spend the rest of my prime fishing vapes out of public restrooms—I wanted something real.”

Since Barker resigned as a Davie County High School English teacher and department chair, he has gone full Henry David Thoreau and now lives near a local Davie County creek. Barker describes his strategy for catching fish with no tools.

“You just have to remember that cavemen did it before any kind of technology, you know?” the newly transcendentalist Barker said.  “I don’t sleep anymore. I just lay by the water and wait until a bass has the audacity to make a noise in my presence.”

While Duckett is ecstatic about having Barker as an asset to the team, some of Barker’s former colleagues have expressed concern.

“He doesn’t even come to game night anymore,” history teacher Karla Miner sighed. “First Kopetzky, then Wood, then that weird stench in the third-floor hallway, and now Barker. I just don’t know how to get him out of this fishing coma.”

As of now, The Weekly Talon is completely unsupervised. Barker forfeited his job as advisor to his dog, Theo, who shockingly knows very little about what it takes to run a newspaper.