I'm grateful for a lot of things, but as spring settles in on Columbia, one thing that I am most grateful for is my tolerance for pollen! My car is yellow, my yard is yellow, the lake is yellow, there is a thick layer of yellow dust that captures every passing footstep on my front porch. The weather is beautiful, the flowers are blooming and the bees are buzzing!
For the last week or so the weather has reminded me of the carefree days of childhood, so distant from the fun but stressful days of grad school. It's not a particular memory that I am reminded of, or even a collection of memories. It's just a feeling. I close my eyes and feel a light wind on my face and smell the blossoms. I almost expect to open my eyes, look down and see dusty, bare feet (not exactly unlikely in reality), hear my neighborhood friends beckoning, feel the sting of the cuts I just got running through the pampas grass. Sometimes childhood doesn't seem so far away.
Turns out this is good fishing weather! I have long since convinced myself that there are no fish in "Laura's Lake". Sure, something jumps at the surface of the water every morning and evening. Sometimes I see a fin-like appendage roll out of the water. But, I was a rockin' fisher(wo)man as a little kid, and if there were any fish in this lake, they would have been fighting each other to take my hook! Of course, those were the days when Papa Joe would set up my gear, give me the bait to use, and tell me where to cast. But, I was the one who did all of the hard work that required real skill!!! So, if I hadn't caught much of anything, it must be that my lake is barren. Surely!
My neighbor, Robert, was out fishing a few evenings ago. I headed out to chat with him for a few. After a while I went in to get a beer and a chair, then returned to the dock. He sent me back in to get my pole. We had a great time enjoying the weather and getting to know each other. We have always had very pleasant interactions in the past, but our conversations, if you could call them that, were short and consisted mostly of niceties. After an hour or two the sun had pretty well set and we couldn't see the corks anymore. I good time to call it a night? Nah. Robert hooked up a workshop-type light with an extension cord to the house. The light spilled over the lake, illuminating our corks, as well as the bugs that it attracted. We watched the bats dipping into the beams. They were doing their best to make our experience as bug-free as possible. We did some stargazing. After quite a bit of friendly debate, I managed to convince Robert that Orion was not the Big Dipper, but was, in fact, Orion. An easy mistake to make if you are not familiar with the hunter and his configuration of starts, especially when the Dipper has not yet risen.
I also pointed out Jupiter and Venus. These planets rise directly across the lake from our dock and make for a beautiful show. Now that I think about it, I wish I had gotten a shot of them with the lake in the foreground just as the sun set. At this time of night, the planets are bright enough to be obvious, but there is still enough light of dusk to get a good look at the lake. I'll make it a point to do this tonight.
At the recommendation and urging of a friend, I took my fancy camera with its fancy zoom and focused in on Jupiter. A little bright dot. I snapped the photo, but it was just a little bright dot. Ah well. I thought about it later, and I wasn't satisfied. The SD card I was using at the time was a 4 gig class 4 back up card that I use with my Panasonic Lumix.
My regular 16 gig class 10 card had been lost to the world somewhere between the office and home the other day after I brought it in to put some of the photos on the blogs. Yes, I lost the card. Yes, I lost ALL the photos from the week and a half before, including the awesome White-breasted Nuthatch photos and all of the Spring Break photos. Fortunately, I always try to post the best images on the blog, so I still have those. The class 4 cards are not able to write fast enough for optimal performance with the PowerShot.
When my new class 10 card arrived (thank you Amazon Prime, for your awesome free 2-day shipping!!!) I gave it another go. I took several shots of Jupiter, some looked just as the previous one had, but if you zoomed in, some clearly showed another little illuminated dot! It's weird, this second dot was fairly obvious in the "view finder", but it was invisible in the image on the camera unless I digitally zoomed the image. Somehow in the dark I accidentally enabled the digital zoom, but just went with it. So I zoomed in on Jupiter, and I zoomed some more, and some more. When the camera finally reached its limit the screen displayed a little, blue "140x". CRAZY! I took a few shots, and this is what came of it:
No details of the planet, but you can clearly see two of the four Galilean moons (Jupiter has around 65 total moons, I say around because this number changes frequently). No telling which two they are, but this it pretty darn cool. What an awesome camera! Thanks for the idea, Rick!
While we were out there, the otter swam through our light, just a few feet from the dock, heading north. Robert was surprised by his direction and guaranteed that we would see him again going back the other way. With this assurance and my absurd impulse to capture everything on "film", I ran inside for my camera.
At this point I think we had already hooked two fish. The first struck Robert's line as he was headed up to the house for something. The pole bent over, the butt rising off the dock. I grabbed it and hollered at him. "Well reel it in!" he said. He came back to the dock, but left the fish to me. It didn't put up much of a fight, but decent enough for me to realize how much I used to love this. We (Robert) knew it was a catfish because it stayed as deep as it could manage for as long as it could. It finally surfaced when I had it right in front of the dock and it didn't have enough line to do anything else. As I pulled it out of the water we got a brief glimpse before it slipped to hook and disappeared.
The second fish encounter happened similarly. We never saw the cork go under, just the pole double over. This one we landed. This is when I learned that Robert doesn't much care for catfish, at least not alive! Apparently he usually just steps on them and yanks until his hook is free. I'm not a fan of this technique, sounds pretty horrific to me. So, I grab the fish before he can stop. He thinks I'm crazy, comes up with a couple of catfish-related nicknames for me, but allows me to hold the fish as he works to free the nearly-swallowed hook. I forgot that those little bastards bite, and they bite hard! But it is tolerable. I hold it by the bottom lip as I suspend it over the water to release it. Just as I let go, it clamps down. So I'm standing there hanging my arm out over the water with a catfish firmly attached to my thumb. Robert was a little troubled, I wouldn't be surprised if it gave him nightmares, but eventually the fish let go and carried on with its merry life.
The third catfish we caught was similar, though less eventful. A few seconds after I dropped it back in the water I saw it emerge again right in front of the dock. Usually not a good sign for the health of the fish. It only took a split second to realize that this wasn't the catfish, but the otter making his return trip. I scrambled to get the camera and get it focused on him. Unfortunately, the auto mode doesn't like trying to focus in the dark without the flash on. So, I missed it. But, it's pretty cool to know that the other is more-or-less always out there. I thought he just visited every few weeks, but it seems he actually lives on the lake. I'm surprised I haven't seen more of him.
Anyway, we eventually call it a night.
The next day on my way home from school I stop by a bait store in town and pick up a couple dozen minnows. Robert said they would start hitting when the sun dropped low, around 6:30-7. Sure enough, between about 6:45 and 7:30 I caught six black crappie. The first three were fairly small. The last three were "keepers". The sixth was quite large! Before I called it a night I decided to take a picture of the big one to share with y'all. I scooped him out of the bucket, dropped him on the dock, but recovered him. As I held him up by his bottom lip I tried to get a good angle with the camera. The fish wiggled. The fish waggled. The fish slipped from my grip, flopped onto the dock and flipped into the water! Ha! I felt pretty stupid! But, I still managed to giggle at myself. With that disappointment I got to thinking about the other two meal-size crappie in the bucket. I didn't want to bother cleaning them, so I dumped them back into the water to be caught another day. I learned a valuable lesson that evening...If you want the fish to stay in the bucket, leave the damned fish in the bucket!!!
The next evening I caught two, released one and named one dinner. :-)
I did finally get a shot of one of the little guys.
Some friends are meant to come over this afternoon and see if they can do any good, but I'm guessing they will be too hung over from yesterday's St. Patty's day festivities downtown. Their stories make me glad I decided to have a nice, quite day at home!
