I just got back from a weekend camping at Palmetto State Park with my food-frakking deputy Julia and a bunch of friends. We observed a fair amount of nature there, like this face-sized dragonfly.
The whole park was overrun by caterpillars, and there was some discussion if this blond one I found was an example of the deadly asp caterpillar.
Aaah! It’s bolting toward my face!
On the edge of the campsite there was a pile of mushrooms that was infested with maggots.
The maggots were in the process of evacuating the mushrooms, which meant that they were actually jumping free. You wouldn’t think that something so small, with no legs, could jump as far as they did. As much as a foot in some cases.
I spent a lot of time fishing. Palmetto State Park has an oxbow lake where most people were doing their fishing, and personally, I wasn’t too impressed. There were many little sunfish, but they all looked a bit anemic. After a bit of work, I caught this 7-incher. I think it may have been a longear sunfish.
It did not provide nearly as much meat as I would have expected.
I also worked the stretch of the San Marcos river that made a couple of bends through the park. The water moved at a pretty fast clip, and I had the best luck working bobbers and bait through the eddies and pillowing rapids. It was a surprisingly dynamic way to fish. A few small bass hiding along the rip-rap struck at worms.
But the best fishing came from the catfish.
I had no idea that catfish could be so clean looking and energetic. They were like bearded fish-puppies. And when you had them out of the water, they made an oinking sound that resembled the sound a fish would make while it was begging for its life.
I caught a bunch of small catfish, and then, using chartreuse nightcrawlers (they cost a dollar extra with the chartreuse dye), I started catching much larger catfish. There were two 14-inch catfish and one 17-inch. The biggest one bit on a very large grasshopper.
There is truly nothing like the feeling of a heavy catfish fighting at the end of the line.
The catch would look much bigger, but it’s in comparison to me, a quite burly fellow.
I’ve never cleaned catfish of this size before, so it was an educational process.
The skin and the fins have to be pulled off with pliers. I exerted a surprising amount of force breaking these catfish into edible bits. But when I was done, there was three frying pans worth of fish meat, enough to give a serving to ten people.
Also, there was a big pile of fish guts and heads.
Man, that’s gross. Why would I even take a picture of that?