Cat-astrophe and Epiphany

How do I like to relax?  This time of year, fishing is the main way.  Only a few more weeks of warm summer-like weather and long evenings to make fishing the neighborhood lake an easy choice when I have two or three hours at the end of a long day.  After two services at church, lunch, and a nice nap, it looked like the rain had abated sufficiently to attempt a short session.

Today I decided to target channel cats again, but that plan didn’t bear much fruit.  In about two hours of casting punch bait under a float all over my little point, I only had three dinks to show for it.  I tried near, far, deep, shallow—all to no avail—cat-astrophe!

While I was keeping the turtles occupied with floating trout chow, after a while, I notice the odd carp breaching and sucking up the chow along with the turtles.  After trying so long and hard for catfish, boredom set in, but I was too tired and lazy to start all over from scratch rigging another rod.  I couldn’t floater fish for the carp, because the turtles were too numerous to make that possible in the chummed area.  I decided, on a lark, to try fishing some dough balls under the float by squeezing bread around the hook, figuring there were carp swimming all around underneath that floating chow.  Sure enough, on the first cast, within seconds the float disappeared!  A nice battle resulted in a nearly seven pound specimen—the largest I’ve caught out of this lake this summer (and about the second largest I’ve ever caught out of it)!  It didn’t take long for a second take—this time an almost four pounder!  I told God I thought I could be content with one more, and, within a minute or two, another take, which resulted in another nearly four pounder.  Unfortunately, I didn’t know my own heart—I wasn’t content with that one more, rationalizing that I would finish off the one piece of bread I had left.  I should have left when I said I would, as several casts yielded only a 10-pound snapping turtle.  I had to cut the line, as the hook was attached to those dangerous, powerful jaws.  Attempting extraction would be foolish.  Turtle released and digits intact, I packed away my tackle and gear and headed home in the dark of 8:30 PM.

Whenever I walk the 100 yards or so home in the dark, I always use my head torch and hold my rods and net out in front of my face.  Why?  During the summer, wood spiders are common in our neighborhood—you know, those big, red spiders that emerge every night at dusk to begin constructing their large (can be in excess of three feet in diameter) webs across whatever open space they take a fancy to.  I think that would be one of my worst nightmares—walking into one of those huge, sticky webs and knowing that big spider was probably crawling on me somewhere—ugh!  Up until tonight, I haven’t seen one on my after-dark walks home this summer, but tonight I had a close call.  Almost home—in fact, right at our next-door-neighbor’s fence, I almost walked into one busily building its nightly trap!  Fortunately, the head torch showed it up a little to my left, so I was able to skirt it by stepping a couple feet to the right—whew!  Heart attack averted!

Carp on bread dough balls under a float—who knew?  Epiphany!