Fishing Merit Badge

Requirement 9 is the one you cannot decide to finish

Nine of the ten requirements here are done by doing them. You can plan a knot session, plan an afternoon on lure identification, plan the regulations reading.

Requirement 9 is catch one fish and identify it, and no amount of planning guarantees it. It is the only requirement on this badge, and one of very few anywhere in this library, whose completion depends on something outside the Scout.

So start it first, not ninth. Every trip you take while working on the rest of the badge is a chance at it.

The arrow you expect between 9 and 10 is not there

Requirement 10 asks you to clean and cook a fish you have caught. Reading down the list, that plainly waits on requirement 9.

It does not. Requirement 10 goes on, in its own words, to cover the case where you cannot catch one: acquire a fish, clean the fish you acquired, cook the fish you acquired. The badge has deliberately built a route around the requirement that luck controls.

That is why this plan draws no dependency from 9 to 10. Drawing one would be inventing a gate the requirements went out of their way to avoid, and it would tell a Scout who has not caught anything that they are stuck when they are not.

(You are not required to eat it. That is in the requirement too.)

Requirement 7 decides whether requirement 10 is legal

Requirement 7 is obtaining and reviewing the game fishing regulations where you live, and explaining why they exist. It reads like homework sitting between two conversations about sportsmanship.

It is also what tells you the season, the size limits, the bag limits and whether you may keep a fish at all, which is exactly what requirement 10 needs to know before you cook anything. Requirement 10 itself is conditional on regulations and health concerns permitting.

Do requirement 7 early, and do it for the water you will actually fish.

What this page is

The Fishing merit badge, drawn so that the requirement outside your control is visibly first and the dependency that is not there is visibly absent. It is not a copy of the requirements: each step is a short label with a link to the official requirements, which are what actually governs and which change from year to year.