Adventures in Fishing

Since I am barely doing any running, I decided it was time to take on another sport. Of course I chose what could arguably be considered the most sedentary sport of all time--if a sport at all: Fishing. Oh, yes, you heard me.

Of course, my initial thought was to sunbathe with a good novel while Jeff caught all the fish, then cleaned them for our dinner. Alas, the reality of it was very different…

On Sunday, we headed to Dick's Sporting Goods to load up on all kinds of fishing equipment - rods, hooks, line, and of course, bait aka. disgusting squirmy live worms.

After watching the Michigan basketball game at Sushi Zushi (all that fishing talk made me crave sashimi), we headed to Brushy Creek in Cedar Park.

Getting there took a little longer than predicted because we got lost due to bad directions, but we still had a few hours of sunshine left.

Unfortunately, we had a rough start… Once we opened the can of worms (prophetic) we realized that they were all dead. Not just dead, but melted together and shriveled up to the size of toothpicks—soggy, rotten toothpicks, actually. As if those things weren’t gross enough already.

So we had no worms and were forced to fish with the little sparkly gummy worm-type fake fish we got at Dicks. Fine with me!

But as it turns out, my sparkly pink fishing rod was not the best quality (shocker). The line got all tangled up pretty much immediately, and when it wasn’t getting tangled on its own, I would of course manage to get it wrapped around some kind of branch while attempting to cast it (in my defense, it was really windy!).

So, two hours, a multitude of mosquito bites, and no fish later, we were getting pretty discouraged. The last drop was when a gigantic bug flew directly into Jeff’s eye, which promptly began to swell. We decided to call it a day.

***

The next day, I called Dick’s from my desk at work, and treated my co-workers to what must have sounded like a very interesting conversation starting with “Hi! Do y’all have any live worms?”

I learned that apparently all the worms in their fridge had perished and it would be another week till they had live ones. Not to be deterred, I headed to a specialty bait shop after work. When the owner - a very nice guy names Joe - learned that we were going to Brushy Creek, he insisted on giving me some live minnows from his huge tank.

He then demonstrated how I was to pierce the poor lil fishy’s head with the hook (“It ain’t gonna kill it; he’ll keep flappin’ around to attract the big fish”). I had to hide my horror the entire time and just nodded as if, yep, no problem, that sounded like a plan.

Yuck.

We decided to try Emma Long Park this time, but still no luck.

All we managed to catch was this little sunfish Jeff is holding.

Still, we are not giving up!

A few lessons learned:

- Fish don’t eat chicken, so use worms.

- Don’t attempt to hold a worm with a leaf as you try to put it on a hook. Sadly, there’s no way to do it without touching the little monsters.

- Worms BLEED. Yes, they bleed red gooey blood… GROSS!

- Don’t attempt to clean off the gooey worm blood from your hands with scented wet wipes. Apparently, the fish don’t like the smell of lavender and vanilla. Who knew?