It has been a while....

  The Bayou and surrounding Back Bay offer a variety of creatures to observe.  Most are the usual fish, alligators and birds.  Occasionally, however, something is seen that either gives you a case of jitters or causes you to stop and ponder.  That was the case today.  Not so much the jitters but the pondering was sure set into motion. Mark and I had just started our morning routine of fishing for lunch when I decided to check the crab pots.  We were not really interested in catching a lot of crabs but Mark had a hankering for a few soft shells.  If you keep  a single crab in the trap long enough and overfeed it, the crab will shed and become the delicacy that he wanted.  I knew we had two crabs in the pot but was hoping to find one of them had shed during the night.  Hopefully, the other crab had not cannibalized the soft one as they are prone to do.

  When I pulled on the rope that held the pot, I was not ready for the weight that I encountered.  Ugh!  We either had a turtle or lots of crabs!  I hoisted the crab pot up on the pier only to find that I had neither.  Inside the trap was a wiggly eel!  Wow!  That was one FAT eel!  It took me a moment to realize that the eel had gotten into the trap to eat my soft shell crab!  No wonder that fellow was so fat!  It does not pay to be greedy!

  Now that the eel had eaten an entire crab, it had gotten itself into a fine fix.  Going into the trap was easy.  The eel had slipped right through the wire mesh to dine upon my crab.  Going out afterward proved to be the problem. The now fat belly of the eel prevented it from making a quick escape! It was stuck!  Well, I surely was not going to grab hold to that slimy, wiggly eel!  It took me a while to unhook the crawler door and shake the eel out onto the pier so the critter was a bit exhausted after its ordeal!  Silly eel!

  It has been a while since I have seen an eel.  Back when I was a kid fishing this area with my cousin, we regularly caught the critters on our fishing poles.  My cousin and I used to hate when we pulled one out of the water.  Being six year old girls, we were not about to unhook that thing!  (Yes, we were allowed to go fishing by ourselves back in the day.)  Since we did not have replacement hooks, we came up with a removal method that worked for us but probably was a bit uncomfortable for the poor eel.  We would slide the fishing line between the pier boards with the eel under the pier.  Then....we would pull up on the line as hard as we could to literally rip the hook from the eels mouth.  Sometimes, the eel suffered a tear but I never remember hurting one to the point that it went belly up on us.  Goodness, how things can bring back memories!  Like I said...it has been a while...and I still do not like them.