Angels have Lyres, so do wives of Fishermen...

Angels have Lyres, so do wives of Fishermen...

We have been staying with Susan now for a week. So far I have found a job after several interviews, but it has its quirks. First of all I applied to work as a Nurseryman, and the boss at Wilson's nursery wants to hire me as an engraver. He wants to start engraving bricks of all things, and finds his sand blasting system (for rocks) not up to the task.

I have already done some research into this and find that laser engraving, polymer filling is the way to create this right, and wonder at what I am getting in to. He wants 1000 bricks done this way. If I pull this off it will be a miracle.

Sean has a line at working a high class restaurant in town though they have not interviewed him. Still, he knows well three of it's employees Robert (Susan's son) Noah, (Sean's Cousin) and Grant (A housemate of the other two staying here). It seems a referral this way at this business is usually a shoe-in.

Before either of us jump back into the work-a-day world again, I suggested to Sean we take a fishing trip. Sean has never in his life fished, and that is much of what Missourians and Arkansans do. So we really aught to learn if nothing else to shed a bit of our Greenhorn reputations.

We mapped out a nearby lake with camping and set off for it Saturday Morning. This was our camp

Once we set up we set off for the lake, equipped with recently purchased rods, cans of worms, hooks and bobs, looking for the stupidest fish we could find to mug. The morning was hot and we found that the fish were very clever at removing our worm and leaving the hook. It seems they had done this before. We continued to try, moving to a boat dock that was unoccupied. Another old man set up a few feet from the dock where he proceeded to catch fish about every five minutes while we just fed them our worms.




Catching them would require greater wiles on our part, so I took a cherry flavored jelly bean, adding it to my bait to catch some young fish with a sweet tooth unawares. Eventually this ridiculous strategy caught me this Nar Whale pictured here. He fought the good fight, but was no match for a completely novice fishermen like myself.

As you can see the size and ferocity of the leviathan are of an extreme nature, and I am doing all I can to keep the pipe in my mouth as I lift him over the railing. We placed the fish in a bucket of water, hoping to find more stupid fish to make a meal. I figure this one would not go very far in a skillet by himself. Sean was having no luck at all in his efforts. I suggested we use sticks of dynamite, but he would not hear of it. It was a fishing pole or nothing.

Sean would not give it up however. He did make good friends with a turtle whom stole his bait no fewer than ten times. We tried up the lake and then back down, and decided to go back to the tackle store for smaller hooks and better bait. The fish had already eaten most of our worms and were growing tired of the lack of variety. We hoped to challenge them better with a more subtle hook as well. We also picked up half a case of beer, just in case we found any beer drinking bear at camp we could throw them down and save ourselves.

We came across this portion of swampy looking bank and set up, thinking many fish might like living around underwater tree branches. It was past 6pm and I was beginning to worry Sean might fail at dumb fish catching and go home frustrated. I had already released my Nar Whale, not wanting to have to kill and gut it, and besides I bought hot dogs and sausage with the beer. I can't eat catfish. They are too cute to eat. (And taste kinda mucky).

Sean had a close encounter, then a catch. We identified it as a deadly South American Piranha that must have stowed away in the fish bowl of a recent illegal immigrant. Not wanting to eat illegal food in the country without papers, we let it go for ICE to round up later.

Satisfied with at least finding a use for fishing rods besides tangling line, we headed back to our camp. Luckily we found no beer drinking bears waiting for us, so we decided to lighten our load by a few ounces so as not to over tax the Jeep's transmission.

Sean soon was wandering around the camp singing Bavarian Beer Drinking tunes and dancing in lederhosen. I shed my shirt to demonstrate I too was of white Germanic Heritage. Ya, Ve ist der Master race when it comes to drinking cheap beer. Good fortune shown upon us again, (or perhaps it was Sean's I-phone and it's flash attachment) and in a nearby stream I caught an entire school of red checker fish. The black ones however eluded me, thus I had only the red ones. Since one has to have both red and black ones to get them to play checkers together, I decided that since I had given the Narwhale and the Piranha clemency, it was high time I was rewarded. Thus I fried them up with chili, hot sauce and hot dogs.

Sean watched with keen interest as I prepared our meal, taking only a moment or two to find a comfortable place to watch and wait for dinner.

After a good meal, we discussed getting up at 5 am and going back to catch more fish. We agreed this was the plan and squeezed into our tent. During the night raccoons raised our camp and I had to chase them off. I put away the trash they were after and squeezed back into the tent, an experience for me much like being born. By 4 am it was raining. Morning came finding us unwilling to crawl out of our bunks to almost 7 am. It was wet and not exactly great fishing weather (at least not from the catching point of view as far as comfort.) Sean had a chill so we decided to break camp and cash in our fish and chips.