fish eyes

The great thing about having a father who drags you fishing is staring for hours at a time at the boats passing by and the water rippling ever so gently on the surface, while smelling the combination of salt, fish scales, and deep-fried seafood.

During these father-daughter bonding sessions, my job is to fish for small bait fish (baby bluefish), which he then puts on the hook to lure bigger fish. Wonderful concept. My line has five little hooks with pieces of silver plastic, so when I jerk the line, it looks like a minature school of fish is jumping (very clever).

The part that I find most difficult is extracating the hook from the fish. It's easy when the hook is simply caught on the fish's lip and I can just work it out. It's much more difficult and becomes torturous when the fish swallows the the hook entirely (greedy fish) and it gets caught in the gills. Then I'm elevated to the position of a surgeon without skill or anesthetics. There's usually a lot of fishy blood involved, and occaisonally pieces of gills and other parts coming loose. The most memorable incident is a fish who got the hook caught in his (or her) eye. The hook wasn't just caught in one eye. It went through it's skin to loop around the other eye as well. With my non-surgical fingers, I tried to inch the hook out, and the fish was free after one minute, sans one eye. One eyeball, oozing red-black blood, was left on my hook. It was mildly disgusting at the time, and upon reflection a few hours later, it was really gross.

Besides baby bluefish, I've also caught baby barracudas (nasty sharp teeth), sea robins (they actually moan), and shad. My dad mainly catches fluke (A relative of flounder) and occaisonally striped bass (huge monsters). Regulations say that only those above 17.5 and 28 inches, respectively, can be taken home. Out at sea, there's massive bluefish and tuna.

Our fanaticism struck at 5:30AM Saturday morning, when we went to fish in the premordial mist and watched the sun rise. The ocean was teeming with bluefish. There were so many that they could barely swim around each other. I caught ~80 tiny fish that morning and promply broke all of my hooks from the wear. That was fun:) Anyway, back to the poor one-eyed fish. It went half-crazy from the pain and leapt between the boards of the deck to rejoin its family...so every story does have a happy ending, after all.