Duck! Fish!
Imagine yourself boating down the Missouri River. You're having a great day, maybe tossing back a few while you fish in one of the Midwest's great rivers. Maybe you aren't having much luck in your current spot, which is fine for an hour or two. But the beer starts running low, and you figure maybe it's time to motor down the river to try a new spot.
Being drunk, you like to go fast. You crank it up, the high-pitched bubbling whir of your Evinrude 115HP churning the river behind you. You pry open another Bud longneck; you feel the wind in your hair. No matter that your stringer is still empty. You know what they say about a bad day fishing--It beats a good day working.
Life is good.
Suddenly, you catch a giant silver carp. You would be elated, but there is a problem. You caught this giant carp with the side of your face, knocking both the beer from your waiting mouth and a filling from your teeth.
That's right. There are giant carp leaping from the water in the Missouri River. Turns out, the carp were imported as a mechanism to eat excess algae and waste in aquaculture ponds. But, as it usually happens, nature played a trick on us. Floodwaters caused these giant aggressive carp to spill out into the rivers, and now they are a BFP (Big Fucking Problem).
It seems that the sound of boat propellers drive these carp mad, causing them to leap from the water and into the boats (or into the drivers and passengers of the boats). Injuries are being suffered. Check this great picture out. It's smaller than I would like, but it gives you a sense of what's happening:
Look at that fish! Now, you might be saying to yourself, "Big deal. That fish doesn't look that scary to me. It's small. Besides, what fisherman doesn't want fish to jump into his boat?" But what if I told you that the fish in the picture is actually a hundred yards behind the boat?! That would make the fish approximately 20 feet long and 600 pounds, and only a druken idiot like the rube in the picture above would believe such a thing.
Such embellishment is not needed. Asian carp can get quite large, as you can see below:
Turns out, these guys were just kneeling for a picture and that giant Asian carp lept from the river and landed right in their hands just as the shutter clicked. You try getting hit in the head with 50 pounds of fish while going 30 MPH, while drinking a longneck Bud, and you see how you like it.
This means I absolutely cannot ever fish the Missouri River. I'll tell you why.
The only big fish I ever caught was a carp, probably in the 8 to 10 pound range. That doesn't sound like much, but let me tell you, it wasn't easy landing that fish. Carp are nasty fighting fish, the Mike Tyson of fishes. I fought that carp for nearly an hour on the Cottonwood River in Emporia, KS.
Worst of all, Scott and Steve, my college roommates that I was fishing with, had left on a three-hour quest to find someone to buy us beer (seeing as how we were underage at the time). So I had no one to share in my glory, to congratulate me on the Herculean task of landing this Monster Fish.
But land it I did.
Unfortunately, upon landing this poor defeated fish, I realized that I really hadn't thought I would catch anything, and so I had no stringer, no bucket, no anything with which to keep this fish. And you'd better believe that I was going to keep this fish, at least long enough to show to Scott and Steve when and if they returned. We had taken up fishing two weeks before, and they only thing any of us had caught in that time was a buzz from the beer and stink bait. They were going to see this fish if it killed me (or killed the fish).
I'm not proud of what I had to do, and I wouldn't do it today, being much more aware of catch and release ethics and whatnot. I put the fish on the bank of the river, but it just kept flopping it's way down to the water. Well, I couldn't have that. I knew that the fish wasn't going to last too long out of the water, but I also knew that there was no way for me to keep it in the water. So I put it up higher on the dirt bank. Gravity and fish-flopping were a power enemy to me, though, and the fish continued to find its way back to the lifesource and escape route of the Cottonwood.
Finally, shamefully, I did the only thing I could do. I picked up the now dirt-caked carp, which was icky and sticky and gross and flopping and nasty, and I carried it even farther up the bank, where I then placed a large limestone rock on it.
That pretty much solved my problem, though I'm sure the carp felt differently about it.
Like I said, I'm not proud of this. I was 19 and dumb and didn't know a damn thing about fishing. But I had fought this damn thing, and I had landed it, and I wasn't about to have nothing to show my friends to validate my struggle.
They eventually came with a case of Schaefer's. They saw the large limestone rock quivering on the side of the bank. I explained that there was a large fish under the rock, a fish that I caught, that I fought with everything my $20 Wal-Mart rod and pole had. I lifted the rock. They stared at a dirt and blood-caked fish, then turned to look at me. It wasn't the gleam of admiration that I expected. It was like I had done something wrong.
Steve said "That fish doesn't look too good." Scott drank a Schaefer's, nodding. But before we had a chance to pick the fish up, gravity began to take it back home. The fish was still alive, but not so much so that it was flopping. It just kind of slowly slid down the bank, turning over a couple of times before it finally hit the water, where it slowly floated out into the current, and down out of site.
Steve said "Well...sometimes it takes fish awhile to regenerate. You might not have killed it. How long was it out of the water?" I said I didn't know; an hour? Then Scott said, "Why did you put it under that rock?" I told the story of the flopping, how willful this fish was to escape.
"But why didn't you just let it go?" I had thought this was obvious. "I wanted you guys to see the big fish I caught."
They both just looked at me, at the rock, at the river. "Oh," they said. Oh? I gave myself blisters on both hands and killed a carp for "Oh?". Didn't they see the size of that fish? Didn't they care? Had I really lost perspective? It seems I had. We sat on the banks and killed as much of that case of Schaefer's as we could until the mosquitos got too bad, and the shadows got too long. It was one of the last times I fished, and it was the last time I ever caught anything.
Anyway, that's why I can't fish on the Missouri. I figure karma dictates that I've got a big fat carp with my name on it ready to smack me a good one.
10:30:15 AM 
|
