Stranger things

  I should have been doing chores about the Little Bayou House.  I should have been watering the plants in the greenhouse.  I should have been putting the final touches on the Christmas decorations.  I should have been doing a lot of things....instead, I went fishing.  It was a gorgeous, sunshiny day and the weather forecasters are calling for storms for the next three days so it was only natural for me to head to the pier before the rains set in for the duration.  I needed to get in that last bit of fishing.  I figure the rainy days can be spent doing all the inside chores that need doing.  There was no use in letting a pretty day go to waste.  Make hay will the sun shines and all that good stuff.  In other words, I grabbed ahold of any reason just to get to the pier.  It seemed to me that it was my turn to catch a big fish.

  I did catch a nice redfish which will make supper tomorrow night.  I am sure that I probably could have caught more but it seemed selfish to take more than needed.  This one twenty-eight inch fish would more than suffice as a meal..or two.   The only problem was that with Hubby out of town, I had to fillet that fish.  He usually fillets the larger fish but, here again, I guess it was just my turn.  For anyone who has never cleaned a large redfish, it is no easy task.  Those scales are  rather tough and slicing through them requires a super sharp filleting knife.  It did not help matters much that I had just smashed my finger trying to repair the washing machine!  The wounded finger did not want to cooperate making the job doubly difficult.  

  Once I removed the nice slabs of meat, curiosity got the best of me.  It seemed that the stomach of this fish was unusually "packed".  Since I had to retrieve my hook (I had cut the line instead of digging around hunting for my hook.), I slit open the stomach. That redfish was a bit of a glutton!  Inside I found, three menhaden, one goby and one small catfish!  (I cannot believe the fish ate a horned catfish!)  But that was not all.  As I wiggled out my hook, I found another smaller hook.  This fish had already been caught once and had gotten free only to snatch my bait.  Here, he was not so lucky.  I caught him!  I picked out the other hook only to find that it was not the line that was broken but the hook itself.  The eye of the hook was missing!  A lot of folks make fun of me with my large hooks but I guess this just proves it pays to think big if you want to catch huge fish!  

  Finding the second hook inside the redfish made me think of an old that old saying "Even a fish would stay out of trouble if it would learn to keep its mouth shut!"  This one just did not learn its lesson well the first time.