cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fish in a Barrel Yesterday I woke up sick but I went fishing anyway. Before fishing, I worked on the bridge some. I hiked up the hill a ways and found a perfect cedar tree that had fallen and died in a storm about 8-10 years ago and was laying across another deadfall. Up off the ground like that it had not rotted and was still perfectly sound. I spent the next hour or so hacking at it with saw and hatchet to cut a 15' section of the trunk free. I hacked off the remains of the branches and hauled it down to set in in place. The crude bridge is not finished yet, but one can at least get all the way across if one has good balance. There's enough good cedar left in that trunk to finish it another day. I was too sick and feverish to continue any more serious manual labor after setting that one beam. Through with the bridge for the day, I set to working on the carp situation. ALL of the corn I had dropped in the shallows the day before, right where they like to hang out, was still there. I'm going to have to find something else for bait. I had brought my scoped .22 rifle for squirrels or whatever else presented its self and I decided to try shooting the fucking carp already. The trail that I blazed and cut last week, leading to the bridge, goes up on a steep slope overlooking the lower pond. There on the trail I could sit and see right down steeply into the pond and watch the carp as they lazily swam just beneath the surface. You know that old saw about something being as easy as 'shooting fish in a barrel?' Yeah, that's kind of bullshit. Shooting fish turns out to be really fucking hard. At least with a .22 rifle. There are several problems, even with a fish that is only a few inches beneath the surface. The first is light refraction. When you are looking right at something that is underwater, you are not really looking right at it. The light bends. Depending on the distance and the angle between you and the thing underwater, and how far underwater it is, and where the sun is, it is practically fucking impossible to say with real precision exactly where the thing is when you need to point a rifle at its brain. The second problem is that as soon as a projectile enters water it loses velocity very quickly. It starts to either mushroom or fragment at about the same rate as it does when it hits flesh. I started out using hollow point bullets but after the first few failures I realized that the hollow points must be expanding so quickly that they were essentially exploding and fragmenting about half an inch under water. That sort of thing is why I fucking hate hollowpoints for hunting in general and rarely use them. You want to kill something, use a solid. Hollowpoints have nice ballistics in mid-air, since the center of gravity is moved towards the rear of the bullet and they can fly nicely true for a longer distance. But once they hit the target they open up immediately and are unlikely to penetrate into a vital area unless you're shooting something very small. Being the guy that I am, I just happened to have a box of another type of ammunition in my pack and I switched to solids. I took on shot that looked like it should have been perfect, but no floating fish resulted. I became worried that maybe I was in fact hitting them but that they were swimming away for 30 seconds or so before dying. So I decided to walk around the pond and see if any carp were floating elsewhere. I grabbed my rod with a bass lure and went for a walk. There were no floaters, unfortunately. But I found out after a few casts that at this time of the very late afternoon the fish were certainly biting. There are sadly no mature bluegill or crappie, on account of the fucking invasive carp having been stocked. But there are some largemouth bass as it turns out. I got 2 nice ones in the space of about 30 minutes. An 11 incher and a 12 incher. With fresh fish to deal with, I packed up and went home. Last night I was horribly sick and slept very little. Fever, sneezing, congestion, runny nose and so forth. This morning I was finally able to sleep for a few hours. I woke up and, still sick, went outside and split some maple kindling to cook the fish for breakfast. The two bass, which I had gutted and scaled yesterday, were still very fresh. I drizzled them with olive oil and rubbed them inside and out with oregano and thyme and a bit of pepper and some lime juice. I cooked them whole over the hardwood fire in the front yard and then drizzled them with just a bit of melted butter. They were very good. Cooking fish any other way doesn't interest me lately. The idea of eating fish that came from God-knows-where and sat around for who-knows-how-long before being sold is disgusting to me. I won't eat fish now unless it either comes out of a can or if I caught it myself. I've stopped cutting off their heads, too. A lot of good meat is lost like that. I wrap them with grape leaves or something along those lines and grill them whole. It is now archery season for deer and I should really be out there hunting today. But I'm just too sick. I could certainly manage to bag one, if I wasn't sneezing too loudly, but the idea of butchering a deer at the moment is just out of the question. I can't handle the physical demands of that task at the moment. Hopefully tomorrow. We really do need the meat. If I try sh0oting carp again, the .22 is out of the question. I think the bullets slow down too quickly when they hit the water. I need bigger, tougher bullets with more velocity. Probably my .30-06 would answer the purpose nicely. The trick is to hit it right in front of the head, so as to stun it. Then jump into the water to retrieve the fish before it comes to its senses. Sho0ting a carp, even one as large as these, squarely in the body with a thirty ought six would result in a dead fish but pretty much nothing left to eat. Man, I really feel like shit right now. I have a ton of writing and email and other shit to do but I have to go lay down for a while. 4:07 p.m. - 2010-10-12 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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