Thursday, October 7, 2010

the one that got away...

carp, the fish..not the town...
 
when I was a youngster in Illinois, me and my friends and I would fish in Diamond Lake in the summer...the lake was a wonder...we'd torture little worms by impaling them on hooks; we'd take frogs and blow them up with firecrackers (we decided later that was not cool) and we'd make spear guns and nail grasshoppers...but fishing was #1 on our fun list...we'd see the fish at the shore, drop our lines and play with them until they bit...these were small fries compared to the legendary fish that lurked in the lake..the carp! and they were big and kinda scared me because they swam like dolphins..slow and graceful...
we caught perch and carp and brought them home, cleaned them and cooked them..awesome!!
that was the mid-sixties and the carp, for some very silly reasons, is still causing fits among Americans.....it's evil, it's invasive, it'll wreck the eco-system...there's a huge panic now in the Great Lakes area and you can bet "scientists" are gonna spend millions to get rid of this fish..of course, the main reason is economics..these folks are afraid the fish will eat into the lucrative fishing industry...locally, bow fishing of carp was ok'd due to irrational fears..but they are fish, so why not just catch and eat them....they are good!! and this nonsense about destroying habitat is just that..nonsense....nature has a way of controlling any population and carp die-offs happen, so the threat is mostly in the heads of the native-only freaks...the best way to control a population is to hunt it, or in this case fish it...nothing better than casting your line into the lake and watching the red and white bobber drop and then feeling the pressure on the line when you catch one and reel it in....these Asian carps or any carp are fish, not aliens from another planet...it's true some get big, but the ones here aren't the giants depicted in other media....once I caught a marlin in Florida so big we had to call a tugboat to help us bring it in!! really!!

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