How Not To Fish.....

I caught fish today. White Perch. About half-a-dozen or so, all about 8 inches. I may never again though if I have to use the same method. I kept thinking about something my friend Curt suggested a while back: "I wonder what would happen if you just threw a redworm out on the bottom." So I thought, what the hell, it's worth a try. The first challenge was to find worms. I know from my backyard landscaping that the ground is very rocky and not good for finding earth worms. So I drove to a nearby bait shop and asked for redworms. "You mean bloodworms?" the clerk asked. Seeing that there were no redworms on the bait list, I thought this must be the closest thing around, so I bought a dozen. "That'll be ten dollars and fifty six cents," the clerk said. Considering I'd just paid three dollars a gallon for gas, and a hundred bucks for a pallet of rocks, I cursed the local cost-of-living, swallowed hard, and coughed up the cash. The guy handed me a plastic bag full of grass and sure enough, something that looked like redworms.

Here's where I should say that I really don't like fishing with live bait. To me fishing should be clean and stress free. So, I wasn't looking forward to baiting the worms anyway. Even worse, these worms looked like they had thousands of tiny little legs. Nevertheless, for the sake of science, I picked one up and started to slide it on the hook. That's when it happened. I've never seen anything like it. That worm transformed it's normal looking redworm-like head into the face of a fanged multi-mouthed monster and latched on to my finger. Fortunately, it bit into a guitar callous so I didn't feel it, but that didn't stop me from screaming like a girl as I shook it off into the Bay. I started to throw them all away, but remembering they cost nearly a buck each, I found some gloves and managed to get one of the bleeding little monsters on my hook. Sure enough, that worm had barely settled on the bottom when, wham, a hard bite. I set the hook into the first White Perch I've ever caught. They look very much like what we call "Stripe" in Tennessee and run about the same size, maybe a little smaller. I used up the rest of my worms, but resolved to figure out how to catch them on artificial bait from now on. Otherwise, they can stay in the Bay! -S