Hershell and I got a call this week from our friend, Budco, who was filling in a pond for a field tiling job he was doing. He called saying the number of fish coming out of the pond was unreal. Would we like to come and save a few more for our pond. We jumped in the truck and headed that way. No thought of how things would be when we arrived. Thank goodness I had enough sense to pitch a net in the truck. Hip boots never entered my mind. When we arrived on the scene, we found a couple of hog wallow type streams that we needed to cross. Not even the 4-wheel drive truck would help. It was a trip we needed to make on foot. The muck and mire where we needed to cross was too wide to jump, but we had to try. Hershell made it across without getting too muddy. I attempted to jump to what I thought was a solid spot, but you can guess the rest of the story. My solid spot target turned out not to be so solid. My foot slipped, bringing me down, flat on my back, in the mucky hog wallow of a stream and since he had tried to help me, down he went, too. We were both laughing so hard, it took what seemed like forever to get ourselves up and out of the muck. After we got over the embarrassment and humiliation, we proceeded to dip up many fish to take home to our pond. 21 blue gill and 6 bass. Not a bad days fishing. I hope my former classmate, Nelson Burnett, is following my story. I'd like to tell him, "If this is anything like noodling, I want no part of it ever again. Sorry." Many years ago, he informed our eighth grade class that he had been dubbed with the nickname Noodler. When asked why, he replied, "Because I love to noodle." I never knew until that day what noodling was. I have since learned that it means getting in the water, feeling around under the water, and catching fish with only your hands. I, personally, don't see how that could possibly be any fun, but hopefully, you don't need to get down and wallow in the mucky mud to noodle.
Above are a few pictures from our trip. Hershell had rinsed my back side off a bit with the ice cold water from a nearby creek. The water was too cold for much rinsing off. It's a wonder we both didn't catch pneumonia.
