The 26th of August: Week in Review

WARNING: post may contain activities that might be similar to the show on tv somewhere in between Swamp People and Hillbilly Hand Fishin'. I apologize ahead of time but this is what we do for fun. We however do not have poor English or a red neck vocabulary.

If you are not a outdoors sportsman you might have never heard of this sport let me introduce you to bowfishing.

Bowfishing is a method of fishing that uses specialized archery equipment to shoot and retrieve fish. Fish are shot with a barber arrow that is attached with special line to a reel mounted on the bow. Some freshwater species commonly hunted include common carp, grass carp, bighead carp, alligator gar, and paddlefish. In saltwater the fish that are hunted are rays and sharks.

Now that you have been formally introduced let me first start with telling you that this sport is typically performed from atop a boat (fishing boat, canoe etc) or that is what Anthony has taught me since he became addicted to this sport of fishing 3 maybe even 4 years ago. Secondly I want you to know that the best place in our area to go bow fishing for carp in our area is at Dillon State Park in the back waters. The carp are actually over populating the waters so what we are doing is simply population control. Thirdly, I don't typically join Anthony on his bow fishing adventures because it is normally him and his brother Travis so I don't want to intrude their quality time together. On top of that you can just hand me a fishing pole and a chair on the side of the water and I am good to go. I can bait my own hook, cast the line, and most of the time I can take the fish off the hook ( 3 pts for Brittany!) On this particular day (Monday April 2nd to be exact) I was invited to go fishing with Anthony and KW on KW's fishing boat so I willingly went. The fish weren't really biting and we were starting to get pretty bored and kept hearing water splashing on the other side off the bank in this area of water that was sitting there from when the water levels were up. Anthony chalked it up to waterfall or something along that line but after we got bored enough we tied the boat off to a tree and decided to investigate. Needless to stay the splashing water was hundreds (maybe exagerating a bit but there were lots) of carp spawning (mating, doing the dirty, gettin' fresh...you get it right?) This is ideally the best time for bow fishing because we want to prevent the production of offspring. However like I mentioned before you would normally do this from the front of a boat but we couldn't get the boat into these waters so without a second thought the guys had their boots and socks off and were on a mission trudging through knee deep water. I was going to go back to boat and read my book but didn't want to be by myself and they were having lots of fun so I decided to take my boots and socks off and join them. The water was very dark so you couldn't see past an inch under water and lets just say the first time I stepped on a live carp swimming through the water I about pissed my pants!!!!! the only thing that kept me from jumping out of the water or falling was that I had our phones in my pocket and we don't have the insurance package on our phones. After getting comfortable with the situation I started really having fun! I took bunches of pictures but I am going to leave out the gross fish parts just for your viewing purposes. KW's quote of the night when they were stripping their boots and socks was "I feel like Huckleberry Finn or something" I must say it felt very much a long those lines.