It’s just another Brownliner saga where fellows turn up their nose and giggle about who’s got what on their waders – and how they wouldn’t be caught dead in the company of me or Roughfisher …

We get you don’t want us dating your sister, and are resigned to our fate, we were  just attempting to get you to peer over the rim of your latte’ and consider waters other than pristine.

We knew the lines would blur eventually.

… and did they ever – blurred with a vengeance. Now we’re able to enjoy the efforts of hundreds of noble salmon, while cloaked in water where we feel at home, the local sewage plant.

You can scoff at us from the safety of the guardrail – but the satisfying thump of large fish in an orgy of feeding, will be known only to the odiferous few.

The journey from Lake Michigan would have meant swimming through a shipping channel that bisects the ArcelorMittal steel mill and the BP oil refinery, then heading up the Grand Calumet River, through a shallow 700-foot stream that starts at the outflow pipe, then shooting 200 feet up a drain pipe that churns out more than 15 million gallons of water a day.

Once inside the plant, they laid eggs, which hatched into fingerlings that feed on microscopic daphnia — another creature known for dying off quickly when exposed to toxics common to wastewater — then grow and swim back out into the lake. Years later, mature fish return to the spot where they were laid to spawn again.

Baranyai, who started out shoveling sludge as a laborer more than 30 years ago, said watching the annual circle of life unfold in the unlikely environment has made him into a naturalist.

“At first, no one believed us,” said Baranyai, who sought experts to identify the species. “They said they must be carp, then they saw the pictures. Then they said we had salmon, but there was no way they were spawning here, but we had genetic testing that showed they were from the same breeding stock.

I’ll leave it to the magazines to butcher the flies we’re using, I’d be flirting with the boundaries of taste and risking my hard fought PG rating – but there’s tons of white marabou involved…