Hooking everything but fish

My brothers and I and a couple nephews scheduled a four-day weekend at Innsbrook Resort just south of Wright City in Missouri.
I didn’t know the place existed. It’s very peaceful and a “dark resort” meaning you have to turn your outdoor lights off at 10 p.m. so people in the gated resort can experience the stars.
With all the trips I’ve made to St. Louis, this place is about 15 miles southeast of Wentzville off Highway 61, and I didn’t know it was here. It has spring water-sourced ponds and Lake Aspen. We fished on Foxfire Lake for about five hours on Saturday and reeled in about 30 bluegill, red-ear sunfish, crappie, and bass. And for the first time ever, I cleaned fish. Cleaning a bluegill or sunfish is an art form, but not quite as much as catching the fish turned out to be. I had a special hook that was barbed like all the other hooks, but mine, for some reason, was allowing all these 8-10 inch panfish to slurp the worm off without having any jeopardy with the barbed hook hidden by Canadian nightcrawlers.
My older brother Dan hasn’t fished in, like, 12 years and he was all over the place, but every time he managed to get his worm-and-bobber collaboration into the water and not get it wrapped around the top of his pole or snagged in my chair, which was situated precariously close to him and his wild casts – he would reel in a fish.
I had the same number of bites, but they would always just suck the worm right off the hook no matter how many times I poked and wrapped it around. The bobber would dunk a couple times and I would sling my reel up hoping to set the hook. But to no avail. I would have to bring the rigging in to reset a fresh worm. While on the rock and concrete platform built for old guys like me to sit and fish, that damn hook would catch everything it came in contact with, including the concrete. It would find a ledge or a nook, it would catch my chair and I would need needle-nose pliers to get it unstuck. I use textured gloves to remove fish because it’s easier on them and I have more confidence. I had to pull that damn hook out of my gloves, out of my shorts, out of the grass, it actually got wrapped around a metal railing at one point. But a fish that weighs less than eight ounces can meticulously pull a worm off the hook, while letting me know the whole time he’s there, and I can’t get him in.
My nephew started giving me some tips and told me my pole was too heavy because lighter poles have more action on a bite and can help set the hook.
Ahhhhh.
Well, that makes some sense. He also said I was fishing too deep and that helped the fish because I had more work to do, but I wanted to fish deeper thinking there were bigger fish down there. That makes sense, right? The first fish I caught was a bass about 10 inches long. The rules at Innsbrook are the smaller bass should be harvested and the 12–18-inch fish should be released. I think it’s because the younger quicker fish are eating everything bass eat and leaving the bigger fish struggling.
By the time we were done fishing, we had about 30 fish that were keepable and my youngest brother and I cleaned them all while the others waited patiently for the fish. The art comes into play as you clean, and I had never done it before. I Googled some videos and went to work. These fish were still alive, and I felt awful slicing them open behind the head and dorsal fin. While their tails arched upward. But I didn’t want to spoil the fish, so we were going to eat what we caught.
After about the 10^th fish, I started to get a feel for just how to slide the knife over the rib cage and down through the tail and then gently filet the meat from the skin. This eliminates the need for removing the scales. It was certainly a messy proposition, but after cleaning the harvested meat with fresh water and then soaking them in whole milk. We re-rinsed them and then put them in an egg-and-milk bath before putting them in cornmeal and spices and frying them in hot oil in a pot on the grill.
Everyone sampled the fish and said it was good, but I think they were a little skeptical and only sampled. My oldest brother, who cooked them all, and I ate most of them and we only found three bones in all that fish.
Not too bad. Not too bad at all.
We played golf at the resort course and took in a rainy St. Louis Cardinals game where we got all-inclusive tickets only to experience a 2-hour rain delay. It amounted to not much more than a really expensive dinner because my parking app said I had maxed out my meter at 8 hours and it wouldn’t let me extend, so we had to leave.
We were there making memories and not much else really mattered. – But that’s Beside the Point.
Chuck Vandenberg is editor and co-owner of Pen City Current and can be reached at Charles.V@PenCityCurrent.com.