One morning when we were not factory fishing we were
just trying to catch fish with a rod and reel. My dad, my brother and
I were out in our boat on the lake trying to catch catfish and bass.
While they are both fish they are from different tribes with vastly
different tastes and cultures. If you want to catch them both at the
same time every man and boy has to have a separate pole for each. On
the pole you intend to catch catfish with you must rig with a big
hook, preferable treble, or as many call it the 'three hook'. Then
you put on plenty of weight because the catfish is a bottom feeder.
Finally, you put something rotten on the end which is usually a
really stinky mush of blood and meat. Ding, ding, ding, ding,
breakfast is on! Get it while it's rotten! They eat that, they get
hooked, we reel them in, and then we eat them, not just good, good
for you. In recent years it has been discovered that all that bottom
feeding has proven to be bad for our health as we have since learned
that the catfish in that lake are full of toxins and the state
recommends that a healthy adult eat no more then 4oz. a week. Well,
no Johnny-Law-dog-deputy-dippity-doolittle is going to be the boss of
me! Heck, some days I'll eat five even six ounces of that deliciously
tainted meat, the chemicals give it flavor. Flavor is something those
button down squares at the state department of health are evidently
willing to sacrifice for properly developing fetuses and proper
kidney function.
Anyway, once we had the catfish pole rigged and cast out
into to reeds we would rig up our pole for white bass. White bass are
a small but aggressive fish that will attack any king of lure and are
a lot of fun to fight into the boat. So we would open up my dad's
multi tiered tackle box and rummage through all of the magnificent
offerings. Chartreuse soft bodied whip tails, pumpkin and hazel
spinners with a day-glow flash, fishermen have more names for colors
and lusters then anyone besides interior decorators and nail polish
manufactures. We would pluck out a promising looking lure, tie it on
and then cast out into the water, preferably as close as possible to
the trees, the bass love to hide under the branches of the trees but
so do the lure eating branches so there is always some loss. The
lures were my dad's so we were not too torn up about snagging and
loosing a lure we would just break the line and re-rig. I had been
casting a large two-hook fish mimicking lure with no success for a
bit so I thought I had better switch up and I cut the old lure off
and set it down while I selected a new one. I was tying on when my
dad asked in a calmly furious tone where in the hell I had set my old
lure. I told him it was right down on that bench he was sitting on.
He then told me he had sat on it and that is was stuck in his. . .
and at this point he used an ugly and vulgar word to describe his
posterior. He went from calmly furious to just regular furious as he
tried to pull the double treble hook out of his nethers. The whole
time he was struggling to remove or even much less see the hook in
his butt he was yelling out oaths of death and dismemberment to my
brother and I. He was toward the back of the boat so we moved to the
front as far as we could to be out of striking distance. He
eventually decided on a top down from the front technique for
removing the hooks. He had pulled his pants and underwear down as far
as the hook would allow, and we tried desperately not to find this
debacle funny. He then got a rusty razor blade from the tackle box
and cut away the clothing so he could get a better look at the
problem. He had one hook from each treble stuck in and the barbs
wouldn't allow him to pull them out so curled up tight and with one
foot up on the side of the boat my dad took the rusty razor and did a
little surgery to remove the hooks. There was a lot of blood and a
lot of cursing and he had to put a shirt into his pants as he pulled
them back up to soak up some of the blood. He was understandably
cranky about me putting my lure on his seat, even though it was an
accident he held me almost solely responsible forgetting it was he
who had sat on the lure. We didn't rush home or anything, we kept
fishing and when the bleeding stopped he pulled the shirt out of his
pants and we went home when the fishing was done. I think since that
time I haven't put any hooks on seats, so lesson learned.
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