Fishing for the holidays!

Of Friday, I headed home to see the parents for the annual Mid-Autumn festival. This ancient, far eastern holiday is celebrated with family gatherings and massive consumption of moon-cakes. Eaten at the conclusion of the traditional rice/wheat harvest, the circular moon-cakes is supposed to represent the eternal unity of family and the cyclical nature of existence, or so I have been told.

In any case, by Saturday afternoon, much eating had commenced and we were all a bit stuffed. So my dad and I decided to go fishing and catch up on old times. We drove to a nearby reservoir and began casting the lines from above a bridge. The fishing proved to be extremely good, which was in fact very odd for this time of the year. We quickly got into the zone and were catching fish left and right, consistently. Pretty soon most of the other fishermen on the bridge started glancing over periodically, since no one, except for one old man caught with the same rapidity.

Fishing is an art that takes quite a long time to master. When fishing under optimal conditions, the skilled fishermen manages to catch fish almost continuously, as if by magic. To beginners and novices, it does appear to be a mystical feat, fish of every type seems to magically appear out of the waters. I was like that once, many years ago. But after fishing every spring/summer/fall for 12 years, one manages to learn a few things.

Firstly, the seasoned hobby fishermen CANNOT fish like a pro everywhere, but only within his specific region. Secondly, during a single fishing day, the tactics of the skilled fisherman would change significantly with fluctuations in temperature,humidity,daylight and water level. Some fish species are optimized to feed during dusk, others during full sunlight, yet others during cloudy weather to evade birds. Darker bait such as earth worms or meal worms presents a sharp contrasting target to the daylight prowling fish with good eyes. Lightly colored bait(wax worms) presents great contrast to bottom feeding or dusk prowling fish with good eyes. Strongly scented bait(dough balls, fermented corn, blood worms) attracts the fish without highly developed vision. Cold water can dampen the enthusiasm of most fish, but other fish enter their mating season during a sudden water temperature drop and thus become more active.

Fishing efficiently with the reel requires a very keen understanding of the ecological niche and basic life cycles of numerous fish species. The man who regularly catches fish like it's magic fundamentally knows WHAT kind of fish to catch WHEN and under WHICH set environmental conditions. With that said we did very well today, in 3 hours we caught:

Saugers => 3
White Bass Hybrid => 2
Sunfish => 9
White Crappies => 16
Black Crappies => 14
White Perch => 5
Yellow Perch => 3
Rock Bass => 7
Pumpkin Seed => 6
Bluegill => 13

In totality, we caught 78 fish of all kinds, after cleaning, we yielded a staggering 42 lbs of fish meat. There were around 10lbs of fish guts and scales which were buried deep within the composting bins. Next year, the garden beds will be even richer, and the cycle is renewed once again!