While I was hanging out eating crawfish with the missus and her side of our family over the Easter break, I was asking myself what the big headline would be for my weekend. Would it be the charming Cajun tradition known as the crawfish boil? My experience of airplane rides, especially landings? The Easter Egg Hunt?
Then, I caught a fish.
I have never caught a fish before, you see. I fished once for about five minutes when I was in the fourth grade.
So when Holy Saturday began, and Terri's uncle, his son and daughter-in-law, my brother-in-law and I ventured into the waters of Bayou Du Large in deep Southeastern Louisiana, I assumed that I would spend most of my time watching. The few minutes I figured I would actually have a pole in my hand, I assumed I would just stand there leisurely and uneventfully.
Nope. When we stopped a pole was immediately placed in my hand.
Then my brother-in-law, who has already had to suffer through teaching me how to play golf, taught me how to bait and cast.
To bait, you have to feed the shrimp onto the hook such that the end of the hook pokes through the end of the tail, which is the strongest part. Makes sure your bait doesn't slip off your hook. No free rides for the fish.
To cast, as best I can understand it,
- make sure you are facing the bank, about 20 or 30 yards out;
- unclamp the line and unreel it so that you have about two feet hanging from the end of the pole;
- hold the fishing line against the pole handle with your index finger;
- pull back, then
- throw forward, releasing the line at its highest point to get the most distance; and
- once the bait hits the water, reclamp the line
- If there's too much slack on the line, reel it in only enough to tighten the line, but not so much that the bait starts reeling back towards you. You want it as close to the bank as possible, because that's where the fish are.
Right, back to that. Now, for about an hour I'd say, I stood there trying to cast and mostly failing. Sometimes I threw forward and the line went nowhere because I had forgotten to unclamp it. "What the--?" I exclaimed to myself.
I unclamped the line, pulled back, and threw forward again. Every now and then I did it right. The bait would fly through the air and land just short of the bank and linger. After a few minutes I would see what I thought was a tug on the bait. Then, I would YANK the pole up as hard and as fast as I could. But what I thought was a bite was just a snag on a seaweed or the push of the current. But now the bait was outside where the fish were, so I would have to reel back and cast again.
At one point I got a pretty good cast off. It landed right near the bank. But at that point I was just muttering to myself. Something like this.
"Gah, this is so frustrating. I can't do anything right. I'll be lucky if I hook seaweed. What am I even doing out -- Hey where'd my bait go?"
I couldn't see my bait anymore. It had disappeared underwater.
I felt the tug on the line. Like so many times before, I yanked the pole upward, and this time it tensed and tugged bigtime.
Terri's uncle and I both saw something come flopping frantically out of the water for a split second.
"It's a flounder!" he said. "Reel! Reel!"
At that moment, the flounder and I were both hooked.
With the rod handle digging into my side, I reeled and pulled like every ounce of my own self-respect depended on it.
As it got closer and closer I could see the creature's panic rippling up to the murky surface. Terri's cousin got the net ready.
When the flounder came splashing up out of the water at the end of my line, it was like I had been born. Terri's cousin scooped it into the net, we unhooked it, and it went straight into the ice-chest.
Before that instant, I had never caught a fish, or successfully preyed upon any type of animal larger than an insect before. I was all that is man in that moment.
Course, I caught the fewest fish out of anyone on the boat. But still!
