Impromptu crappie

I’m sure you’ve heard of black crappie and white crappie, but have you ever heard of:

impromptu crappie?

My good fishing buddy George got laid off from work for a few days this week because of the bad weather and he came to town to buy me lunch at LBK’s. He must have lost some kind of friendly wager (we don’t bet, we just wager), but he loses most of them, so I forgot what it was about.

Anyway, we were finishing up and I said, “Why don’t we go out and fish about an hour? the crappie are still biting if we can find them.” Nothing like a little extemporaneous outdoor activity.

George liked the idea of a trip after some impromptu crappie and he began immediately getting in the right mental state. George and I have always found that the meaner we are to each other, the more fish we catch. We heard a preacher one day say that you should never be ugly to people, but he obviously doesn’t fish. I would tell you more, but George is under federal protective custody and can’t be too public or have his face in photographs.

But back to the story.

George with a couple of his nice impromptu crappie

“I know it’s no use, but we should at least go even though I know you won’t put me on any fish,” he said. “If you did, we wouldn’t know what to catch them on.”

“Probably so,” I replied. “But how will you know if we are on fish or not unless you see me catch one. You don’t think you’d catch one, do you?”

I knew we had a good chance when we pulled up the first spot, which I informed George was one of my better ones this time of year. I heard him mumble something like “just a little bit better than fishing in the kitchen sink, huh”.

We were definitely on our game.  We hadn’t fished long until I hooked into a nice black slab crappie and I told George that this time of the year when you catch one, sometimes there are more on the spot. About that time, the quiet still afternoon was interrupted by a 10 mile an hour East wind, which blew us off the spot, which is out in the wide open. No stumps. No trees. No landmarks other than my innate ability to find it, I told George.

“So we will never put a bait there again“, George said. Ha. Pretty soon he caught another one. We moved around to another spot and before you know it, we had enough for him to take home and cook for supper. We caught nine good ones and released two, one voluntary and one not so voluntary. We only fished about an hour.

“The only problem I’ve got now is that I forgot to mention to the little lady that I was coming fishing,” he said, thinking of his wife toiling away at her job. She also loves to eat at LBK’s and catch fish and gets pretty mad at him when he does either and she doesn’t get invited. Oops.

No problem, I told him. I’ll text her a picture of the fish right now! Bing!  Done!

What are friends for?

Better to find out that way than see it on the Blog. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.