Top 5 Reasons You Just Got Skunked

Look, it happens. You get yourself all geared up but….. you fail to produce, like, at all. The time is right for some afternoon (fishing) delight and it just doesn’t happen. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. A lot of my friends also suffer from low-T and can’t catch a fish (this is what skunked means). Obviously this (almost) never happens to me, but as the resident alpha fishing-male of Central Mass I realized it would be selfish to act like its not a problem amongst you mere mortals. So without further ado, here are the top 5 reasons why you just got skunked (in no particular order but I’ve chosen ascending order to build tension):

Reason Number 5: Low-T

Symptoms of Low-T include weight gain, fatigue, and yes, believe it or not (please don’t actually believe any of this and please see a doctor if something is wrong (may I recommend Tommy? He is in med school, you will know that since he exclusively wear shirts that indicate hes in med school))) not catching any fish. If you don’t think a fish knows when a beta male (or female but the low-t joke really doesn’t work for ladies, is Low-E a thing? Please discuss below) with low-T just cast a lure then you need to wake up. My biggest suggestion for this is to man up, take every GMC supplement known to man, and ingest 4-5 times the amount of preworkout recommended (0 is recommended cuz no human on Earth actually needs that). By then you should be feeling ready to let out your war cry (may I recommend Eulalia? it is oft used by Badger Lords and their Fighting Hares in the Redwall book series) and dominate the waters. Trust me, I do this every single day and fish literally just flop to shore and succumb to my being (Note: I’ve caught maybe 3 fish in the past two weeks). If you aren’t sure if this applies to you, here is a very graphic picture of what low-T looks like:

Reason Number 4: You’ve Showered Recently

This is kinda similar to the post above. Fish respect certain fisherman and their lures. And if you’ve ever been around successful fisherman (ME) then you realize they have an extremely earthy, rugged, and au-naturel odor about them. We call this odor musk. Its the dead of summer, in my spare time I’ve been chopping through the overgrown plants in the woods out back to clear a path, and I flat out refuse to shower in order to build up my musk (it definitely doesn’t hurt with the ladies either (I also can’t prove it helps, one would need more data points (dates) to prove this. But since I have zero, I can technically make this claim)). Sure, people around me are concerned, but you wanna know what? I catch fish and they don’t, so I must be doing something right (again I have not been catching fish lately). When you approach a shoreline, you want all the fish to know – and I mean ALL the fish. Back in the olden times people didn’t bath but they were able to survive. By not showering and developing that musk you are channeling that base element. Don’t believe me? This guy hasn’t been bathed in 3 years (since he got sprayed by a skunk) and he seems to be doing pretty, pretty well (I don’t know how to put the preeeeetty, preeeety good inflection in writing):

Reason Number 3: You Went Fishing With Me

Sorry not sorry for catching all the fish instead of you (I have been thoroughly out-caught by Tommy recently and it is literally killing me and everything in this entire section is a lie). I happen to be extremely skilled so please don’t feel bad when you don’t catch fish because they all prefer to be caught by yours truly. Sometimes I just walk by a small body of water and a fish jumps out and fillets themselves. I wish I could hide this ability but Gaia (Mother Earth) smiles upon me. It hurts me that all my friends I fish with (one friend; should I count the guy that lives in my apartment complex that asked if I wanted to go fishing when he saw me with my rod and then we made plans but I forgot I had a prior commitment and cancelled and I’ve never heard from him since? Yeah I think I will so lets say TWO friends) don’t catch fish. But I don’t have a solution for this, I’m simply a curse upon others but truly #blessed when it comes to catching fish. I understand this may make you feel like this when fishing with me:

Note on the above picture: I do not leave my dog unattended outside off leash. BUT, in the near (and wonderful) four years I’ve had Bubz he has displayed zero aptitude in terms of understanding how doors specifically and entrances in general work. If you are going through the house’s side door he assumes you’re going through the deck entrance and vice versa. If you’re about to open a door he positions himself perfectly… to get smacked in the face by said door. I have to get him to back off the door but then he just assumes we’re going somewhere else and then I just give up and meet him at whatever entrance he ends up and let him in. He is incredibly stubborn and tunnel-visioned, I have no idea where he gets that from (he gets that from me).

Reason Number 4: You Drank Too Much

Yes it is possible to achieve this and yes in my previous blog I may have mentioned I’m skilled enough to catch a sunfish while *ahem* being mentally lubricated (I would never do this while blogging) but that is because I’m awesome. Shore fishing takes focus, a lot of moving around, and having to deal with potential knots (I don’t know why but I am cursed knot-wise, roughly 30% of my time fishing I’m just dealing with knots (I do know why it’s because I’m not good at this)). So if you want to catch mad-gucci fish then pack lightly in that regard. Dealing with knots and bugs and constant sun after a few too many is not fun at all (“How do you know?!??!” says the outraged audience, how the fricken heck you think I know? C’mon Smalls, piece it together this is a kids blog after all). If you want to get loaded and “fish” then get a boat (as a side note, do you have a boat I could borrow?). As general advice, if I’m fishing for 2-3 hours then, if I’m in the mood, I’ll pack beverages for the last hour (sidenote: obviously summer beers don’t count at all and there’s always the time on the porch/couch/anywhere after fishing). And if you aren’t sure if you’re drinking too much, then here’s a picture of what it looks like to have overly imbibed:

Reason Number 5: Getting Skunked is the Entire Point of Fishing

I’ve been skunked a number of times recently. Basically more often than not. It sucks, fish aren’t biting cuz of the warm weather and I’ve just stood and baked in the sun. But honestly that is kinda why actually catching a fish is so awesome. It is the best feeling in the world when you get a bite on the line (“best” is strongly used here) and the worst when it doesn’t hook or its seaweed (FUDGE seaweed). But without that variance catching a fish wouldn’t be fun at all. Every day you don’t catch a fish is an investment into the feeling when you actually do catch one.

I went fishing with Tommy and my brother the other day and the previous couple days hadn’t caught anything. And for the first four hours I didn’t catch anything while they both caught fish, it was obviously ridiculous and some sort of god-like plot against me when you think about the skill differential between those two and myself (I angrily muttered this to myself for hours on end). And then I got a hit! It looked like a cute little sunfish and I was happy…. and then it didn’t move when I started reeling in. And then it started to make me move with my rod to keep up with it. I assumed it was a bigger bass and I tried to work it up to the shore….and then it got caught in some reeds and I thought, “What the hell is that?” Turns out I caught a decent size chain pickerel. I’m gonna blog about pickerel in general at some point because they are the fish my feelings have changed the most about in my short time fishing. But here it is:

To put it short pickerel are an angry fish and bigger ones such as this have teeth to use. Notice the convex shape to my body; I’m smiling through my fear as this thing was stronger than a mule and wanted to rip my head off so I decided to create maximum distance (and notice you don’t notice any spots of fear-induced urination because I thought ahead and wore black shorts!). Again I don’t want to talk too much about pickerel cuz they deserve their own blog but my point is I caught this devilfish after not having caught anything for days and it took the 30 second fight to get it on shore for me to be ecstatic and so glad I ever picked up a rod. Just ask Tommy and my brother, I know I was really happy and talkative because they literally just refused to acknowledge I was speaking to them after roughly five minutes. And you want to know what it took to reach this type of euphoria? I decided to…

Cast and pray,

Jon (I cheated you of a picture of Bubz on the last reason so here’s the best one)