The story of my most recent fishing trip starts with crickets. Thousands and thousands of crickets.
Apparently this is a fairly common event this time of year. I think that Highland Mall has a particularly large swarm because they irrigate their tiny patches of grass and then keep the parking lot lights on all night long.
Did you know that crickets can fly? You would never believe it looking at them.
They certainly didn’t try to fly often enough as I caught them and put them in my bait bucket.
So armed with a bucket of crickets I set out to the lake. And for the first three hours there was nothing. At one point I cast my line into the center of a school of fish and I could actually see them staring disdainfully at the bait.
But a few hours later I tried again, and virtually every cast got a bite. Those fish love crickets.
By neglecting to include a frame of reference in this shot, you have no idea that the fish is only a few inches long.
I’ve adopted a system of keeping one of my bicycle buckets filled with ice. Then I can just toss in the fish, and they stay fresh until they meet Mr.Fillet knife.
The largest fish I caught that day was a redbreast sunfish. They’re easy to identify because they have a yellow breast and they have an elongated gill flap or "ear" that is much longer than the longear sunfish. Yes, virtually everything about the longear’s naming scheme is a lie.
It was nine inches long, and considering that the lake record for this species is only an inch longer, that’s not bad at all. When it hit the cricket it sunk the bobber completely out of sight and felt like a barbell at the end of the line.
Something that I had forgotten about fishing was the shear variety of life one encounters. In this case, leeches.
A message to all you nature-worshipping pagans out there: nature is freaking disgusting.
I’m reasonably certain that I got off all the leeches from my catch. And if I didn’t, some corn meal and hot oil took care of things.
