Out and About (Fishing Thread)

[EscapedMentalPatientParticipant 1489]

I thought it might be cool to share some of our fishing ventures this year, for those of you who engage in this ultimate therapeutic endeavour.

I finally managed to get out and do a little fishing this year.

I went out to a place about 250KM from my home and had some pretty good luck!  I managed to reel in nine of our leeetle friends:  2 Burbot, a Northern Pike, a Goldeye, and 5 Rainbow trout.  I caught all of these slough sharks with a simple chartreuse green spinner combo, baited with a dead minnow and weighted with a 1/4 ounce keel chain sinker.  I’ve found this to be a simple and versatile baiting combo, as you can navigate your lure fairly well at any given depth, weed-free, once you get the feel of it.  I wasn’t really in the mood to filet the Pike, or skin the Burbot, so I copped out and just kept 4 of the nicest Rainbow trout for gutting:

I threw two of them into the smoker, and filleted the other two to keep for grill or oven baking.

After 6 hours of cold-smoking, with soaked apple-wood chips, behold the glory:

I love smoked fish; particularly Steelhead, Atlantic/Pacific Salmonoids, and Goldeye (although you need a fairly good sized mess of these to make it worth your effort).

If you’ve got some stories (complete with pictures), I’d love to hear/see them.

I’m usually an avid fisherman, but certain circumstances don’t permit for me this year, so I need to live vicariously through you guys damnit! LOL

Let’s see some fish! 🙂

[RoyDalParticipant]

Society asks MGTOWs: Why are you not making more tax-slaves?

[griffinParticipant 189]

was fishing yesterday, got a nice little 24lb Chinook…would load a pic but doesn’t want to work-lol

 

 

[EscapedMentalPatientParticipant 1489]

Hell yeah.  I love Chinook.  They can certainly put up a beauty of a fight.  24lb’er will give you a good wiggle on the rod!  Sweet.

[AlbertParticipant 646]

“Piscator Non Solum Piscatur”

That fish you’ve got smoking there looks damn good. I can almost taste it.

I’m very much a novice fisherman but I flew over to Ireland four years ago for a week of salmon fishing. Despite the brutal weather Ireland is a fantastic place and some of the fish are absolute beasts!

I teach in a university so unfortunately I can’t put a photo of myself on here but a couple of the fish we caught were about this size:

E=MC² Bitch

[EscapedMentalPatientParticipant 1489]

That sounds like it would have been a helluva great trip, Albert!

Sometimes I prefer inclement weather when on such trips, or when in particularly good locations.  It has a way of weeding out a lot of people and increasing privacy and solitude.

There really is nothing like the feeling of latching on to a lunker like you’ve posted in that photo.  What a beautiful fish.

I bet you’ve got some lifetime memories from that trip; good on you for generating an experience like that.

[AlbertParticipant 646]

It was a great trip but, yes, extremely cold. Sometimes standing in the river I went numb from toes to b~~~~ waiting for the fish to bite! A great memory though and something I’d do again.

Having shivered in rivers I think a much nicer and much warmer place to fish would Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

Imagine catching a Red Emperor like the one in the photo? That’d be a lifetime experience!

E=MC² Bitch

[EscapedMentalPatientParticipant 1489]

Albert wrote:

Having shivered in rivers I think a much nicer and much warmer place to fish would Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

I hear you man.  A great deal of my fishing has been spent in shivering cold waters as well.  I used to drift fish for Steelhead in Northwestern Ontario in waders and a tube in some pretty chilly times, especially in the rain.

I once bought an army surplus pair of pure wool, Swedish paratrooper pants from Cold War times for 20 bucks.  They looked pretty goofy; flared knees,  suspenders and all, but MAN, it didn’t matter what time of year, either ice-fishing or fishing in rain, those suckers were WARM!   While I’ve always had good luck in such weather, somewhere like the Great Barrier Reef has always appealed to me as well.  There would undoubtedly be some beautiful fish to catch there.

I fished for Marlin off of the west coast of Mexico, and unfortunately that time, I was dead skunked.  I’d like to have a fish story for that outing, but alas,  not even a tug on the line.  It was still a very nice, relaxing time though.

A few days after that, I had decided to wander into the older part of Puerto Vallarta, fairly early in the morning, away from the touristy type of stuff.  I was walking along the beach, and came upon the area where the local trade fishermen hung out.  A few of them had not gone out yet.  I accosted a young fella and asked about finding a deal to go fishing.  It turned out he was a fisherman himself.  Although we didn’t agree to a price, he agreed to take me out for the day.  His English wasn’t so s~~~ hot, but my Spanish was considerably more horrible, so nothing to complain about there.  He said he needed an hour to cut bait, gather line and such, so I scooted back to one of the numerous little confection stores that litter that area.

After getting a post-nuclear war supply of beer, a bunch of weird square shaped cigarettes, some beef jerky (the beef part was probably questionable), some bottled water and the stupidest, most f~~~ed-up looking hat I could find, I made my way back to the beach.  I was hungover as s~~~ from the Hard Rock Cafe from the night before and seriously needed a bit of R and R, sitting proudly like a fat white bastard in a boat.  Well, I wasn’t really proud, I wasn’t fat, the sun had long denied me being white, and I didn’t have a boat, so I guess I was essentially just a bastard.  Anyway I digress.

Dude was waiting for me down at the edge of the water with a little rowboat, which had a couple of his requisite lackeys in it.  He informed me that for just “Five American Dollars” his friend would row us out to his fishing boat so that the fishing could commence.  This sort of started me off in a bad mood, and I thought this might be the beginning of a bulls~~~ shenanigan where I’d have to pay 10 bucks every time I had to take a p~~~ or such.  And I wasn’t too sure about the two other guys who had suddenly showed up.  I didn’t get too worried about it though; I was younger, and I was built like a brick s~~~ house back then.  I’d also bought a stiletto knife at one of those seedy market booths a couple of days prior due to reports of Canadians being kidnapped in grand old Me-Heee-Co.   So to make a short story long, I ultimately decided to go with the flow and away we went.  I wasn’t much concerned about my money back then.  I had spent the season prior working pipeline in the oilfields, and I had stowed a pile of cash.

His buddies rowed us about 75 yards out to where his dilapidated little craft was moored.  It was some baby blue, beat to s~~~ tub, with an old 25 horse Johnson on the back that may well have been Christ’s first boat motor.  There were hundreds of Pelicans, scattered all over the bay, perched on everything they could perch on, the sounds of the ocean and the villagers working, and with the sun over the horizon in the East, it really made for a beautiful, post-card scene.

Jesus (imagine that) and I hopped into his boat, and after he beat the hell out of the motor and yelled at it a few times, he got it going and headed us off into the West.

First, he took me to a relatively nondescript location, probably 400 yards offshore and idled the motor down.  He gave me a 10 foot long battered pole that had some serious ass thick braided line on it, and on the end was this pathetic looking hot pink “Octopus” jig which had probably been used longer than a three dollar whore on a drunken Friday night.  He just yanked out about 50 foot of line, and started racing the boat in circles.  We were traveling fast enough that my lure was just skipping on the surface of the water.  I thought this was probably a pretty odd fishing tactic, but who was I to argue with a guy who fished for a living.

It was all of a minute before I caught the first of over 30 Bonito.  These were all in the 8-15 pound range, I would say.  We had a total blast.  We drank my beer, ate my beef jerky, smoked my cigarettes, brought the boat to a halt and just cast for an hour or so.  Here we were; neither of us could barely understand one another, we were from completely different walks of life and we both just smiled, laughed, fished and had one of the greatest times ever.  He then proceeded to give me a truly guided tour of the coast line, motored me through Los Arcos marine park, and took me all over.

Before I knew it, the sun was getting lower in the sky, and we were headed back.  We’d been out for a good 8 or 9 hours and it had just flown by.

When we got back to the beach, I asked him what I owed him.  He kind of shuffled his feet and asked embarrassingly for 20 dollars.  I couldn’t believe my ears.  I an-ted up and gave him 150 bucks to which he pretty much reacted like I’d given him the world.

Such is the nature of fishing.  It breeds camaraderie the world over and seems to bring us down to that basic level, where if for only a few hours, we are just human beings again.

That was a great trip.

[AlbertParticipant 646]

Wow. What a great story (You’re an excellent writer). That was one hell of an experience and must be a great memory.

It’s definitely true that fishing breeds camaraderie and allows us to cancel out the stress and rush that seems to make up so much of modern life.

I think it’s something only men understand though, most women just don’t seem to get it.

About twenty years ago I was working in England and dating a girl whose only interests in life were money and TV soap operas. One morning as I prepared to go fishing she informed me that she would be joining me even though I said she’d hate it.

It was only fifteen minutes drive to the river so we were soon sitting in the sun for what should have been a relaxing day. Unfortunately as predicted my girlfriend quickly grew restless, She started fidgeting around like a child and complaining that fishing was ‘f~~~in borin and f~~~in stoopid’.

She eventually decided to go and look around a couple of local shops. She told me to meet her later in a nearby riverside pub (so I could buy her lunch). Having given me my orders she tottered off.

Finally some peace and quiet. After a long wait I managed to hook a big vicious Northern Pike and was so pleased with my one catch of the day that I quickly got into my car and drove to a friends house to boast. My friend was also a novice fisherman as well as a fine cook and we were soon drinking beer and eating a fantastic bit of fish.

I never saw my girlfriend again – As far as I know she’s still waiting for me in that pub.

E=MC² Bitch

[Author]

Posts