Hooked on It

My friend Pete, aka Retep, and I have had a lot of fun fishing together over the years. We both can make each other laugh pretty easily, and are usually pretty witty, at least with each other.

One particular time we went fishing at my cousin's camp, which has a small lake. We went fishing for Walleye. It was a perfect evening for it. We settled on a spot and got our lines into the water. We tried to keep things quiet and not spook all the fish, but we both were joking around. Finally, after about twenty minutes I got a fish on. It was already pretty dark, and it was hard to see. It was a decent size, and would be good to eat, but we didn't have a stringer to put it on.

This fish was probably the most rowdy Walleye I've ever seen. Usually trout are the type to jump around and make noise, but this guy was lying in the bottom of the boat doing his own gymnastics routine. With the aluminum bottom, he sounded kind of like a Jamaican steel-drummer. We needed to quiet him down.

Since we didn't have a stringer, we decided we should probably kill it. Now what Pete did would probably be funnier if you saw it with your own eyes, but still, I think it's hilarious. He grabbed the fish in one hand and started punching it in the head with the other hand. He was going for the knockout punch! I think you had to be there, but if you can picture it.

Another time, Pete and I were fishing at night, and we had a lantern draped over one side of a canoe. We had found a ridge, and we caught something every time we dropped our line down. We had the perfect depth. We were both limited out very quickly, and now we were just fishing for bigger ones.

I told Pete, "I bet these fish are so hungry right now, we could almost catch them with a bare hook."

I was eating a Kit-Kat bar at the time, and decided to see just how hungry they were. I put a small chunk of the bar on the line and dropped it down to the depth that was working. WHAM! I had a fish on. Unbelievable! I haven't tried that trick since, but it sure was funny when I set the hook on a fish that went after my Kit-Kat.