Fun Monday-A Fishing Story

Miss Olive is hosting Fun Monday this week, and she wants to hear something fishy. Here are her instructions:

I would like to hear about your *whopper* of a fishing story. Yes, you heard it correctly whether it is fictional or non fictional I want to hear a fishing story from you. An example would be if you catch a minnow and tell it that you caught a swordfish (exaggeration is the operative word here). Did you hear me say show your photo(s)? Of course you did – be creative.

Well, I like to joke that the only fishing and hunting I do is in the bottom of a cooler, but that's not really true. I don't even spend much time in the cooler, unless of course it holds ice cream. I don't spend much time fishing ANYWHERE, but I do have a tale I can tell.

One of the advantages of growing up in the country, especially in this part of the country, is that there's always a fishing hole somewhere close by. When I was young we had a pond near our house that held more turtles than fish but provided us with a good place to fish. I remember fishing there with Daddy a few times. Handy Man was the big outdoorsman in the family. It wasn't unusal for him to grab a pole and tackle box when he was really young and trot off to the pond. One time he came dragging home a long line of itty bitty fish he had caught all by himself. They were too small to keep but Mama didn't have the heart to tell him to throw them back, so she cooked them for him. There was barely enough for him to eat. He couldn't have been more than eight or ten years old. Teen Angel was about that old when she got a wild hair to go fishin', so I took a day off of work, grabbed an old pole we had lying around the garage, bought some worms at the closest convenience store (most every convenience store around here carries live bait-welcome to Kentucky) and loaded her in the car for a trip to Mama J.'s farm. I was hoping we wouldn't run into a game warden who wanted to see a fishing license.

The family farm is about thirty minutes from our house. It's way out in the boondocks and is a pretty place full of wildlife and a whole mess of peace and quiet. Sitting near the dilapidated old barn is a pond that's barely big enough to take a swim in, but it does hold a few fish. By the way this picture is untouched by PhotoShop and gives you a pretty good idea of the scenery that surrounds us in this region.Teen Angel and I sat up shop near the edge with her pole and bait. Marie..um I mean Mama J. didn't want to be left out of the fun so she pulled up a lawn chair as close to the weeds as she could get without actually touching them. See? She's way over there on the left. It was so weedy, you could barely see my little pumpkin at her perch. I tried not to think about how many snakes were probably slithering around us. After some initial angst over touching worms and learning how to cast past the bank, Teen Angel got the hang of it and before you know it she had caught a fish. She was so excited. He was a little feller so we tossed him back in...and proceeded to catch him again.And again. And again. Over and over she caught a fish. I'm pretty sure it was the same little fish. The pond isn't that big and no sooner would we throw him back and toss the line back in the water than she would snag another catch. It didn't matter that it was the same fish, she had a big time racking up a dozen catches. She kept running up the bank to show Mama J. her catches. We had a great day, and Teen Angel had a big story to tell her Daddy that evening. Aside from a couple of fishing trips with her uncle Handy Man and Grandpa Zeke, that was the end of her fishing career....almost.

Flash forward this past October when we spent a week in Florida at a private home in Gulfport that sat on the marina. While we were having a cook out with friends Teen Angel decided she wanted to go fishing...again...without a fishing license....or equipment. A rather clever friend, who also happens to be one of the best hairdressers in Gulfport, took a decorative fishing pole off the wall, used an old fashioned metal can opener as a weight and a cocktail shrimp as bait and had Teen Angel fixed up in no time. Now we didn't expect anything to come of her fishing adventure and thought T. was sweet to indulge her whim, but that man is ingenious I tell you because within a couple of minutes we heard Teen Angel squealing on the dock. After a great deal of yanking and tugging and some help from T. she managed to pull in the oddest looking catfish we'd ever seen. And we've seen some crazy looking catfish.

(By the way, I hate that shirt she's wearing.) After a couple of pictures and a lot of laughs she tossed him back. This one was big enough to eat but too big to ship home. She is one lucky gal when it comes to fishing, and we are still laughing about her Florida catch.

Now friends, follow me over to Olive's to read everyone else's fishing stories.