"Baitstealer"!

The other day, I was on the pier and as usual was trying to catch my supper. I was being harassed by fish taking my bait without ever taking the hook..this was not fun as it would not put food on my table! This was not at all good! (Unless of course, I am on a diet! Then we could just say the fish were helping me..but that is not the case. I was just not catching anything!) I would bait the hook, toss the line and within just a few minutes have a bite. It would not be a "grab the bait and run" type bite, more of a "nip and tug, nip and tug" type. I could never set the hook. It is a good thing that I had plenty of food in the freezer because if I had to depend on this fishing trip, I would go hungry! After a while, I had used all of the bait minnows. I threw the net to catch just a few more but when I tried to retrieve the net..something large was in it! I could feel the fish pull against the net and when I pulled it near the surface water was being splashed everywhere! My goodness! I heaved the net up on the pier. Oh, no....I had thrown the net over the bait thief! In the net were two large mullet and one spiny fish..a Sheephead. A Sheephead is quite the common fish around piers and pilings where they feed upon the barnacles and small crabs. This fish has five or six black stripes on a gray body and has a row of spiney fins as a dorsal fin. Those spines make it one difficult fish to remove from a net! This one had flipped and flopped itself about so much that the fins were entirely tangled in the net. It took me about twenty minutes to untangle the poor fish with at least half of that being done in the bucket of water. I did not want to clean this fish..so I tried to keep it alive and not cause it any more trauma than it had already seen! I finally managed to disentangle the poor fish and toss it back into the water.

The Sheephead around the pier are usually around three to four pounds but they can reach up to twenty pounds. It is an excellent food fish if you do not mind being poked a few times by the spines. It feeds not only on the barnacles and small crabs but basically anything it wants including plants, shrimp, crabs, small fish and mussels. It is very adept at getting a bait off of the hook which accounts for my bait loss! This habit plus the striped appearance has given it a rather interesting name..the Convict Fish! It is also dubbed the "Baitstealer" for good reason! At least I knew what was taking the bait and if I wanted to catch these, I would need to use a smaller hook!

Tonight, there was another beautiful sunset on the Bayou. It was calm with only a few small ripples on the water. The sunset threw a gorgeous golden glow over the entire Bay..so lovely..so peaceful!