It’s a good thing for some that Saint Peter, the Pearly Gate Keeper, was once a fisherman. He probably makes allowances for harmless exaggerations, embellishments and even total fabrications by the rod and reelers. What’s the harm?
When they’re out in a bass boat with their buddies they might tell a few tall stories , adding an inch or a pound to last season’s “lunker”, but back on dry land, the fishing adventures they recite to landlubbers can make “Moby-Dick” and “Jaws” seem like tame tales.
I once read an accout of a lake that stocked 500 trout in May. In late July local anglers were surveyed to find out how many of the fish had been caught by then. Nearly 2,000 were reported “landed” and another 3,200 were listed as “almost caught” or “tossed back in”.
The survey revealed that the trout, which averaged a foot in length when stocked, had grown rapidly in a very few weeks. None were reported as less than 26 inches when caught. One of the “almost caughts” might have been a full-grown mermaid.
It’s an altogether different situation when a man is fishing off a public pier and is trying to concentrate on a bobber that refuses to bob. Passerby strangers, who would have ignored him if he was begging on a city street, feel compelled to interrupt his desperate prayers for any kind of a bite, to ask “Are you catching any big ones?”
“Just got here,” he will reply, although he’s been standing in the broiling sun for three hours and he doesn’t feel like inventing a “big one that got away” story. That typical passerby question can be even more disturbing if it’s asked by a 10-year old girl with a 5-pound bass dangling on her stringer.
Imagine That 