Outdoors - The pink dress

   My grandson, Zane and a friend of his, Pat decided to invite a group of people over and have a fish fry Saturday evening. To feed a bunch of people fish, somebody needs to catch a whole bunch. If people need a bunch of fish, there might as well be a competition involved in who can catch the most. They decided between them, whoever caught the least number of fish would have to wear a pink dress to the fish fry. That seemed like a reasonable wager to me as long as I was not involved in it.

   My son, Damon, and I decided to help on the catching for the fish fry, just in case Zane and Pat were unable to get enough on their own. When we launched the Jon boat, Zane and Pat were already on the water in the paddle boat. The paddle boat makes an excellent fishing craft if the wind is not blowing, and the waves are not too big. It is able to maneuver into shallow areas and into the weed beds where fish hide. The Jon boat has the advantage of a trolling motor and battery. There is no work involved in getting from one location to another. Damon and I motored toward the downed trees near the end of the lake, dragging jigs as we went. We caught a few fish on the way and tied off on a branch poking out of the water. I put on a small spinner bait and started pulling in crappie. Damon had a larger spinner on his rod and caught several eating sized bass. A nearby submerged hedge tree provided a hide out for quite a number of blue gill. I caught the smaller ones and Damon caught larger ones. There is not much meat on a small blue gill, but they sure are fun to catch.

   Zane and Pat, in the other boat were doing quite well also. Damon and I headed for shore about 10:00 and cleaned our fish. We had 48 fish that we kept. Zane and Pat fished until noon. They had 39 fish between them. When they got their fish cleaned and combined with the ones from our boat, there was an impressive amount of really nice-looking fillets. At that time, there was still disagreement between Pat and Zane as to who caught the most fish and who would be wearing a pink dress at the fish fry.

   My wife and I got to the festivities at about 7:00. Zane and Pat were frying fish, French fries, and onion rings. Neither of them was wearing a pink dress. People were showing up, also bringing food. Everyone was eating some of everything, but the hit of the evening was the nicely breaded fish fillets. The two guys fried fish for about an hour before they got ahead of the demand.

   When the pace of their cooking slowed down to where they could talk, I asked about the pink dress. Pat’s wife had obtained a quite attractive pink dress at Goodwill, but neither was wearing it. All I could get was a somewhat vague answer about one or the other forgetting to count their fish as they went along.

   The food and company made for a pleasant evening. The only thing that could have made the fish fry better would be if one of the cooks had been wearing a pink dress.