Category: Grades 10-12
My Favorite Fishing Story: The Whiskers on a Fish
by Lindsey McErlean
12th Grade, St John the Baptist Diocesan HS
West Islip, New York
As far as my dad is concerned, if you wake up past 6:30 a.m. then you’re a lazy bugger. So it must have been around 6:45 in the morning when my little sister and I were woken by my dad’s voice coming from our bedroom door. With his big voice my dad said “Get up you lazy buggers!” My sister and I are always the last ones awake but we are always the first ones to be ready and to get in the car. On the mornings of fishing trips, my dad is usually getting together some last minute fishing supplies and my mom is always packing up the food and getting coffee. Once my mom piled all the stuff in the back of the car, we were off on our first summer fishing trip.
It was an overcast day. It was dark and dreary but a perfect day for fishing. I won’t tell you where we went except that it’s on Long Island. There were four of us, my mom, dad, sister, and myself. My dad and sister were in one row boat and my mom and I were in the other. Once both our boats were in the water, like a deck of playing cards, my dad dealt out the green speckled grubs, purple worms, and hooks and we began our fishing adventure. The day was going pretty slow. We had arrived at the pond and began our fishing excursion at around 8 a.m. By 8:30, my mom had caught a small red breasted sunfish. We didn’t know it, but we wouldn’t catch another fish for another hour and a half.
When you’re fishing, you have no concept of time. The hours can seem like minutes but other times the minutes can feel like hours. When you are sitting on a row boat…fishing…time just doesn’t matter. It was relaxing to listen to the silence and then to the occasional rustle of trees. No cars, no crowds, just us and the pond. 11 o’clock rolled around and my sister was hungry. So my dad rowed his boat to the launch area and got the food out from his truck. I watched them sit near the water eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a.k.a. PB& Js. They were watching me and my mom fish at a distance. After they were done having lunch, they started to fish from the shoreline and catch baby blue gills. My mom and I stayed on the water for a while…trying to catch something…anything.
We started to head for shore when on our way back my mom asked me to row over to a spot. It was maybe 60 feet away from the launch sight. I rowed over to the spot. Once we reached the spot, my mom’s 4-foot spinning rod arched over. It looked like the tip of the rod was a powerful magnet attracted to the water below. I started to shout, “Keep it up! Keep it up! What on Earth are ya doin’! Get the tip up! Get it up!” The hook was not snagged on weeds…it was something else. ‘Oh my gosh’ I thought…’it’s a snapping turtle…what if it’s a turtle? It’s going to come up and snap and then I’ll only have nine fingers. Do we cut the line? Oh my God. dad has the snippers; we can’t cut the line. What is it? What do we do?”
Then we saw a shimmer moving in the water. Thank God it wasn’t a snapping turtle; it was a fish. ‘But what kind?’ I thought. It was struggling…trying to swim back into the dark water. It had to be a big one. Maybe it was a pickerel? I knew there were big pickerel in this pond because two years earlier my dad and I had spotted a two foot long pickerel with razor sharp teeth. If it’s a pickerel, it has teeth. How do we get the hook out? We don’t have the scissors or the snippers or the pliers. Another shimmer in the water…it was coming closer. I didn’t want a pickerel to be lifted up into the boat. They are so creepy and slimy looking. They’re long and narrow with big teeth. They’re like little freshwater alligators. My shouts continued…”Keep it up! What is it? Slow down! It’s a pickerel! It’s a pickerel!” My mom started to reel slower The fish was slowing down. We could see it. It was only three feet under the water and it was brown, and its belly, white.
I stopped shouting. There was a brief moment of silence as the head of the fish broke the surface of the water. It wasn’t a pickerel or a bass or blue gill…not even a turtle. It had stopped moving as my mom reached out for the line and picked it up into the boat. It had whiskers…a catfish? No way… It was dark brown…almost black with a brush of green on either side of him. Its eyes resembled the end of an unsharpened pencil…the middle so small and dark and then the ring of white around it. Under its chin was white with four thick brown whiskers. Its fins were black with highlights of a reddish brown…it was magnificent. It was a catfish.
The silence of the pond was broken by our screams and laughter. My dad yelled over toward the boat “What the heck are you two doin’?” But we could barely hear him over our laughter. Then we settled down and my mom focused on getting the hook out of the handsome catfish’s mouth. She struggled with the hook. “You’re killing it! It’s dying!” I yelled. My mom continued to struggle with the hook so I started to frantically row toward the clearing where my dad had the pliers. I was almost at the clearing when my mom pushed the hook sideways and the catfish popped off. The catfish slipped onto the boat floor and I jumped up and started screaming again. It was flopping around and sliming the boat. My mom tried to pick it up to fling it back into the water but it slipped out of her hands towards my foot. I leaped over the seat and into the other section of the rowboat.
I love fishing…saltwater or fresh…big fish or small…but I don’t touch fish. So my mom tried to pick it up with her bare hands again and it slipped away. Now the fish was laying there helpless. “It’s dying!” I yelled again. She started laughing again. I finally threw her a rag and she picked up the slippery catfish and released him back into the water. With a quick wiggle, it had swum away from the boat and back into the weeds. We were both laughing so hard that my mom thought she was going to pee her pants. We had just caught a catfish…on Long Island…in our boat. It was so amazing but hilarious at the same time. My mom and I laughed some more and then headed back to shore. My dad kept calling us crazy and saying that we had “lost our marbles”. But it was just so odd that after two hours of no fish we just happened to catch a catfish.
After all the excitement, we had lunch. Then we all got back in our boats and caught two or three more blue gills. We headed back to shore, packed up, and drove home. It was a good day for fishing.