Thursday, May 8, 2008

First catch, Tempura batter and good feeling

The past couple of days I have been away from the keyboard, fishing and cooking and generally chilling out. Not much to do on the work front, and as output on the writing front has been bombing along at 3000+ words a day, I have elected to take it easy and rethink some of the story lines. Wife monopolised my battered old Compaq for her Museum project, and I have been making myself scarce in case she asked me to help out.

Today my fishing activities actually bore fruit. Took advantage of the very low tides and decided to do something about my casting technique. As I have blogged before, I can't cast for toffee, or anything else for that matter, and I was determined to find out why. Fixing a 20z weight to my line with a one metre trace, I farted around until I managed to make one cast of over forty metres. This may not sound much to the experts, but for me it was a superhuman effort. Then I looked at what I had done and tried to replicate the technique. After a couple of embarrassingly muffed efforts, I began to drop my casts at a moderate distance from the shoreline. Thirty and forty metres out, spinning the lure back through two to three metres depth of water. I was quite chuffed. I was even more amazed when what I thought was a snag turned into my first catch ever in BC waters. This little guy was hanging off the hook as I reeled in, pursued by something silvery looking, around sixty centimetres long which turned and flipped into the depths as my catch broke surface. Even though he was of edible size, I wasn't interested as at just under 150mm across the shell, there wasn't enough crab meat for two.



Next item of interest was a Live Lewis Moon shell right at the waters edge. Only a moderate sized one at about four inches diameter across the shell, but still, quite a find. I've found much larger specimens like the one in the photo below, but those have been dead tideworn shells, without much of the colour of the live one above.

Oh yes, I also finally cracked making Tempura batter after many previous woeful failures. I would have taken a photograph, but they were eaten before I could find my camera. Shame.

My paying job is going a bit slow at present, without much happening. Just glad I'm not on commission only, at this rate I'd starve. However, as with all these things, you have to keep going. Something always gives in the end.

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