Friday Night Fishing

After a rainy morning the sky cleared and the sun appeared. It turned out to be a beautiful evening. Dinner prepared by Ray: steak and hot dogs on the grill. With our meat I made sure we had our veggies too. Ray had beans and I had corn. Since it was so nice outside we enjoyed the dinner on the deck overlooking the lake watching the boats drive by and the jet skies.

Within an hour later we had our bait, fishing gear and were sitting on the dock fishing. I was fishing with night crawlers and Ray had his spinner. Every time I threw my pole out the baby fish would pull my bobber under water. Thinking I had a big fish, I would pull hard then reeling my line in only to notice there was no fish and my bait was yet again gone. Ray had this theory to catch a big fish, being the next fish we caught if its little then its going on our line. Our plan was to catch big catfish.

We each put some baby fish guts on our lines threw em in the water and was determined the catfish would be our lines soon. As I threw my line out I did get bites, but it wasn't anything hard that a big catfish would do so I just let the baby fish take the bait. Then I decided to start reeling in and it was so hard. My pole was curling and I was calling for Ray to help. I kept reeling with no help from Ray and the fish kept getting closer and closer to our dock. I just knew it was a big fish but little did I know as it approached the dock it was no fish but it was so heavy.

Ray and I both looked at each other and were surprised at what we saw. A turtle was on my line. We were shocked and weren't even sure how to get it off the line. Ray got it on the dock. We pushed the net away from the turtle seeing what we had to work with. Immediately we noticed his claws and his teeth. But we did notice that my hook was caught in his mouth. So Ray got his gloves on and his pliers hoping we could save this turtle. In the meantime we did what we could do to save the turtle but it wasn't working so we had to take other measures.

Being that we had never caught a turtle we didn't know where to start. So we called the first person we thought we'd thought would give us support and advice how to take care of this turtle. Jan-my mother-in-law was the first person we called and she was stunned we caught a turtle. Her first response was that Uncle Dan was the best at this but he was on vacation but she gave us her best advice. After talking to her we called my dad to see if he ever took care of a turtle and his response was no but that you Uncle Dan knows, and I replied with "hes on vacation". In our conversation with Jan she did say that Uncle Steve knew a little bit so he was our next phone call, yet again he was surprised we caught a turtle but he gave Ray all the knowledge he had.

Ray did the best he could skinning and taking care of the turtle for his first time. When he was finished we looked on the internet for different recipes. The majority of the recipes were in soup form so that's what we decided to do. We didn't cook it till Sunday afternoon, well I mean Ray didn't cook it till then. I was a little nervous about trying Turtle but the way he made it, it tasted like beef stew. He added potatoes, carrots, mushrooms, and onions. It was a new dish for both of us, we both tried it and liked it very much.