Fish Story

Godfather Charles bought Emily and Elias fishing poles.  The tide was all wrong and the terns plunging above the bluefish were far out of range of our limited flotilla of dinghy and kayaks.  Casting is a skill totally new to them, and as they reeled the lure back in it invariably dragged along the bottom.  I figured we'd use the time to get accustomed to the rods and reels and after a few casts they'd tire and move on to other pursuits.  I certainly didn't expect them to catch anything besides the bottom or seaweed.

Elias hooked a quahog.

The odds of catching a hard-shelled clam with this technique are approximately as remote as me winning Megabucks (and I don't play).  Nonetheless as I helped Elias reel in a bluefish spoon that I thought to be fouled on rockweed, in came a bivalve with one of the prongs of the hook wedged securely between the lips of the small portion of the shell that protrudes above the sandy bottom.  I had worked over that stretch of sand the two days before for the clambake and somehow missed this quahog.  It took a great effort to pry loose the hook from what is, for all I know, the only successful catch and release of a clam with rod and reel in the annals of New England fishing. 

Maybe next time he will land a lobster.  Stranger things have happened.

Comments

[Bill West]

Nice catch!

Much better than my only catch when my Grandfather and Dad took some of us cousins fishing on the
Androscoggin River. Much to my Dad's chagrin and my grandfather's amusement, the only thing I hooked was the head of a trout whose bottom half apparently had been some animal's dinner. I heard about that one for years!

[summershine]

Wow, that's very cool!

[charlie crystle]

better catch than mine and theo's...nada

[Tim]

You 're a better fisherman than I.

[kailani]

Hey, that's better than I usually do. I'm famous for not catching a single thing! LOL!

Thank you for sharing this with the Carnival of Family Life!