A fish story ...

We went to my folks' place over Labor Day and I went fishing with the boys and my dad.

Over the summer the kids fished in their pond quite a bit. They knew all the best places and DS1 could identify all the different kinds of fish.

I used my grandma's pole and reel with a life-like artificial night-crawler, cast out into deep water near the area where there seemed to be a lot of action. My dad, AKA Pop, thought the big fish gravitated towards the sunny shallows after minnows.

I caught and released four bass in a row. The biggest was about 10 inches and the others were about six inches long.

The last one got the hook in its jaw so deeply that I sent to boys around the pond to Pop for some pliers. Until they could come back I put the fish back in teh water, still on my line. Maybe that was the wrong thing to do.

While this six-inch bass was zig-zagging and I was watching the boys, out of the corner of my eye I saw something big and dark lunge through the water with a tremendous splash, hit my fish still on the line and then whoosh -- I had nothing left.

I screamed like a girl.

What was that?!

Pop and the boys wondered if it was a catfish. I wondered if that young bass got away or got eaten for dinner. My brother's fiancee suggested it was the Loch Ness monster. If you'd see the algae on the pond, Loch Mess is more like it.

Anyway, that's one of the things I like about fishing -- being outside, on the water, seeing nature. Every cast is a fresh start, fresh hope. And here my analogy fails b/c sometimes at the very end a big catfish comes along and changes everything!