Merry Christmas!

The Fisherman
This blog entry has been long in the making...since Christmas Eve actually....when I spent the afternoon in "FREEZING" weather, alongside a river bank behind a giant earthen dam fishing for catfish. What possessed me to do this I do not know...except that maybe I had never done it before....and maybe, now that I think about, NEVER AGAIN!
However, I do think it appropos to write about the excitement of that afternoon, since the evening events would be all about
“The Fisher of Men.”
 
How did I catch Fred?" 

Imagine this...
Sleet driven, 40 mph, 23 degree temperature winds blowing down over the top the dam onto our backs and into our faces.
Dark, dirty, turbulent, fast-flowing river water.... 

Frozen hands fumbling with cold steel treble hooks...wrapping shad gizzards on and around the sharp tines...Standing downwind of a 5 gallon-sized stink bait bucket of soured pig flesh...Pushing a treble hook with a stick down into the stink bait and then casting that offall into the wind onto the river, praying none of it dropped onto your face or clothes....
Eyes staring blindly at the water below, waiting...waiting...waiting...for a jerk or tug on the line...

SUDDENLY A TUG!     

ZZZZEEEEEETTTTTTTTTTT...........the line went whining up river headed to the spillway behind the big steel gates!
I knew I had a big one because I couldn't pull back on the rod as "Fred" took off with the bait. I began to crank the reel...and crank....and crank.  
Nothing was stopping the monster beneath the water! I thought I had hooked an alligator gar, but the kids told me that those things would just bite through the line....and then roll over on their side and look up at you before swimming away. Not this thing...it just kept on diving deeper and deeper, swimming harder upstream.
FINALLY, it decided to either give up or tired out. I manuevered down the embankment to the water, still cranking as I walked. When we could see how big he was as he surfaced a couple of times, we quickly scrambled to get Fred in the lifting basket to drag him out of the water before he snapped the line. TA DA!!! I thought...."What a feat!"....before I realized that I was totally exhausted.

MY PRIZE FISH!
Here I am (with not a smile, but a GRIMACE) hooking Fred with a weight gauge...barely able to hold him up...! Twenty-Two Pounds!  WOO HOO!
Pride swells as I have my photo taken with him....

Fred is still alive at this point....croaking his displeasure at being bent in half in the cooler. He flopped so hard that he popped the top off the cooler, not that we really needed it that day.
Catfish live a long time out of water. They can be transported between ponds for stocking purposes, as long as they are kept wet and cold.
I pondered Fred's demise, wondering how he would die. "Should I put him back before it would be too late?"

Fred will now be part of an upcoming fish fry. His double filet will feed at least six people. However, on writing these last few words, I have to say that there is an art to killing a fish. Some are skilled in this task, most are not. Since I did not know that art, I watched as Fred was brutally slaughtered. His blood spattering the onlookers as the implement of destruction pounded his body...over and over again.

He could have had a small slit cut into his back, just behind his head... And just like dying by lethal injection, he could have had a small wire or broom straw run down his spine, killing him painlessly and without ceremony. Had I known this, would I have saved Fred from his fate? Pondering....I ask myself this question.....

Am I the big lunker that Christ has tried to catch all these years in the sea of mankind?

What will be MY fate at the final moment?