Never Play With Your Food

Apologies for the quick (9 month) break, I was busy looking for a job, which in PhD-land is a months long (very stressful) process. But fear not! As it turns out, I got a job and am officially a carpet bagger now living down in Virginia with only one thing on my mind — are there any dang fish in these waters?

But first, I had to help celebrate this jabroni getting married:

The timing couldn’t have been better either, there’s nothing your body craves more than a week long bachelor party after moving back and forth from NY to MA to NY to VA to MA to VA in a two week span! To do so, we decided to spend a few days in West Virginia, in the lovely small historic town of Harper’s Ferry:

Anyways, back to the real point of the blog, which is to figure out if fish grow down south or not. As it turns out, they do! When the rest of the crew decided to do something “healthy’’ and go for a hike, I opted to finally check these dang waters. In particular, where the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers merge. It doesn’t look like much, but here’s a picture anyways:

I’m just kidding, it was quite literally the most beautifullest place I’ve ever seen, especially if you’re a few beers deep and standing chest deep in the water as tourists wonder who let the town drunk out of the drunk tank. I figured it would be a great place to catch a bass or two whilst working on my sunburn.

After striking out at the first place, I ended up walking up the Shenandoah river a bit to a spot just above some rapids that formed a deep-ish pool. Typically you’d want to fish below rapids, as these are prime spots for bigger fish to be hunting for small fish (and hopefully your lures). But the rapids stretched too far for me to want to walk out that way, and as long as it was somewhat deep with water flowing towards the pool, I figured that’s where they’d be. Here’s a reminder that no matter where I turned I was dealing with some gorgeous nature:

After a few casts of nothing all the sudden my rod was almost jerked clear of my hands (poor phrasing)! I was in for quite the fight, I assumed I had hooked a monster bass! And then I was almost dragged into the river myself, which a bass has never done to me. I had no idea what I had hooked until I saw a familiar light tan flash. And that’s when I was seriously worried, because I did not have the gear to handle this type of fish. After a hard fight where I was just able to keep the line from snapping, I landed a familiar friend…. a channel catfish!

I was quite stunned, back in NY catfish never went for lures, only real bait in the form of smaller fish. This was a fairly young fish, but nevertheless really strong for the rod and reel I brought with me. As it turned out, I ended up hooking into several larger catfish that did indeed overwhelm the line/rod. Luckily I de-barb all my hooks so they are very likely just to fall out in time. It’s never ideal but I legimately had no idea catfish actually were willing to bite stuff like this, a lesson learned!

Landing a catfish was a bit more than I asked for, especially when you’re a few (more) beers deep balanced on a slippery rock, and young channel catfish are especially known for extremely sharp (and apparently poisonous) barbs on their dorsal and side fins. That said, I knew the boys would be hungry and decided it was completely necessary to get a firm grip on this fish and “dispatch’’ it with a blunt object. Otherwise we simply would have starved.

Welp, that turned out to be a fairly poor choice. Here’s the end result:

WARNING! ABOUT TO SEE A VERY BLOODY HAND PUNCTURED ROUGHLY A HALF INCH BY A CATFISH BARB! IF YOU DON’T LIKE BLOOD, DESPITE IT BEING THE RESULT OF AN EXTREMELY BRAVE AND BADASS ACTION, THEN SCROLL DOWN QUICKLY!

And that kids, is why you shouldn’t play with your food. In hindsight, I should have taken my time and realized I was probably not in a great situation to be attempting such a thing. To say I was hurting was a bit of an understatement, but I was able to still “finish the job” and pack my things, albeit with a hand raised high to limit the bleeding. Luckily our place had a med kit so I could sanitize the wound, as catfish do indeed have bacteria that can cause infection.

To be clear, I never claimed getting a PhD would un-stupid me.

Alright, enough bloodshed and technicalities, time for the cook. It was especially helpful to have a buddy present who’s worked in restaurants, but the plan was pretty straight forward. Dredge it up in flour and whatever spices we could find (I believe we double coated it), then fry it in leftover bacon grease from the morning (the whole trip was a banner week in health). Here’s the “end’’ result, and by end I mean it was like 10:00 pm at night and this was the latest picture of the fish I remembered to take:

It was, of course, delicious. You could tell the water the fish came from was clean. It was served with an avocado dip in lieu of tartar sauce and was enjoyed by all. It was enough to give everyone a taste, or probably one person a full plate. So obviously, it was well worth stabbing my own hand.

In all seriousness, I could not have asked for a better start to my time in Virginia. We ended up spending a few more days back in the DC area, catching a soccer game and some fireworks to end the trip:

There’s several fish I’m unfamiliar with and fully intend on finding them. I’m excited for this new chapter and am approaching it with a lot of optimism. All you really have to do is…

Cast and pray,

Jon  (see below for obligatory photo of Bubz)