Thanks for that Elnut. I'll share my favorite fish story, the first keeper bass I ever caught.
I was 7 years old and my brother was playing a ball game at a field a couple blocks from our downtown Frankfort house. This field backed up to the KY River, right where a sewage line ran into the water. It always stunk there and the sand turned to a dark greenish clay.
Wandering the bank, I find a metal orange stake with a rusted-out hole in the top. Hmmm, I think, this could make a fishing pole.
A little more bank wandering, and I find about 5 feet of old fishing line with a rusty 4/0 hook wrapped up in an overhanging branch. Yeah!
A couple rocks get turned over, and a wriggling redworm is now mine.
Orange stake goes in the sand at the water's edge, line goes through the rusted-out hole in the stake, worm goes on the hook, and into the water. Couldn't have been more than a foot deep.
All of a sudden, my line starts moving left and right. I pull up the stake, and a 4" shad has eaten my worm. Success!
Being 7, it now became my goal to squeeze as much entertainment out of that shad as possible. I put it back in the water and watch my line move side to side. Occasionally, the shad would run out of tethered line and come up to the surface.
You can see where this is going, can't you?
All of a sudden: WHAM! A bass inhales that shad. Couldn't have been much more than 11 inches (10 was legal back then), but to me it might as well have been a 9-pounder. The bass starts to swim away, my orange stake starts coming out of the ground, and I pounce on it like a cat on a mouse.
I wonder what those people in the stands thought when I emerged from the brush, holding an orange stake in one hand and an 11" bass in the other? I didn't have time to think, as it was only 4 blocks home and I was at a dead run.
Why? To put the bass in the bathtub, of course.
Turned on the water, not too hot, not too cold, and put 'er in. Enjoyed watching her swim around a little bit, but for some reason after a minute or two she stopped swimming. Guess I was too young to know about chlorine.
Dad came home after my brother's game and filleted it - ate every bit of it myself. Years later, I kick myself for not putting the bass back in the water so I could have caught a 50-lb. catfish. :-)
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