Today my team and I went fishing with the men of Teen Challenge Romania. I can’t say I was overly excited about it at first. When my team was asked if they wanted to go along, everyone eagerly agreed, and I… quite reluctantly… threw my name in with the lot as well.
So we all awoke at 4 am this Saturday morning, skipped breakfast, and drove a ways to a nice little lake set apart from the town. I was startled to notice that we were in a long queue of cars already waiting to get into the secluded lake. Apparently you had to make a reservation in order to get in to fish.
Either way, our caravan did get in and we set up camp immediately in order to get the fishing underway. After a few atrocious casts on my part, I finally set my bait into the middle of the lake, and sat down to wait for the fish to come to me. After quite a serious wait I decided I should reel my line in and re-cast; maybe there were fish in another place- they certainly weren’t biting my line.
Supes professional
So I stand up to reel my line in, and immediately it gets snagged on something. Great, I think to myself. I’ve caught a dirty old boot or something, and everyone will laugh at me. I fight and fight, and I still think the lure is somewhere on the bottom of the lake, caught on a rock or something.
“Am I stuck on something?” I finally ask someone smarter and more experienced than me.
“No! You’ve got one!”
“One what?!” Clearly, I am meant to be a fisher of things.
“A fish!”
“No way!” The second I get excited about maybe reeling in a big one, the fish jumps ship and I reel in a now-light and slightly-more-empty line. Blast.
This scenario (minus the incredibly embarrassing I-don’t-actually-know-enough-about-fishing-to-know-when-I’m-actually-fishing bit) happened not once, but TWICE MORE. Twice more I hooked a fish on the line, and twice more I lost it trying to reel the dang thing in. One fish was so big that it bent my hook almost all the way back, and the guy in charge of making sure I don’t kill myself had to change my tackle (is that the right term?) and give me a bigger hook.
So I send out my line one more time (it’s perhaps eleventy-billion degrees outside at this point, not a cloud in the sky, and nice dark water to reflect the scorching sunlight), and say to myself, This will be the last one I send out. I need a stinkin’ break.
I probably should have mentioned that I wanted to catch a fish SO BAD. I was praying all day long that Jesus would just let me reel one teensy fish in- that’s all I wanted. I think I might have yelled at the water a couple times, trying to see where all the “feeshes” were. “Bring it on, feeshes!” I would say. It of course didn’t work out that way.
But patience is indeed a virtue and my patience finally paid off. My line started moving and I, out of a ridiculous habit that I definitely blame my bestie Sarah for, yelled “ME!” before hopping to my feet and yanking the line up. And I started reeling.
And reeling.
And reeling.
And…
Well, you get the point.
I might have caught that fish from Romania to the Atlantic Ocean for all the dang reeling I did. TEN MINUTES LATER, as I’m huffing and puffing and wheezing and surrounded by our entire 20-person party who are ALL laughing and cheering, the biggest water monster I’ve ever seen jumps out of the lake and makes a face at me. I can’t believe how huge it is! After a few more minutes of reeling, someone thankfully catches the thing in a net and lifts it from the water. Cheers erupt all around! I am a hero! I have clearly done superpower-y things! I am being lauded and hailed and every other kind of praise one can give a newly-crowned King of the Hill. Unfortunately I neither hear them nor acknowledge them for I am bent over double trying to catch my breath and shake out the awful charlie horses I have in both forearms.
But win I did! Some of the braver men of the group tackled it to the ground in order to release the hook from its mouth, and then they tried to let me hold it for a picture. After several failed attempts to hold it, I finally get some sweet pictures out of the deal, and the River Guardians (or whomever it was that was supervising the fishing of the lake) came over to weigh my fish to see if we could keep it. We could keep anything under 5 kilograms. My fish? Freakin’ nine-point-something-something! That’s between 20 and 22 pounds in American! Wow! It was not only the first fish I’d caught since I was 7, it also ended up being the biggest catch of the day by FAR in a group of mostly competitive/my-fish-is-bigger-than-your-fish M.E.N. I celebrate, I laugh, I run away from the monster as it tries to flop somewhere away from land, and then I’m helped in picking it up and releasing back to the wild.
Look how ginormous that thing is! I found out water monsters such as these are called “carp”
Because if there’s anything you learn growing up in the world today, it’s that hunting and fishing are actually for sport, and catching a fish with a terrifying and horribly painful metal spear and then releasing it back to be caught again is totally morally, ethically, and ecosystemically O.K.
Please enjoy the following photos as well as hilarious videos. The 6 minute one is totally worth watching, by the way.
When I tried to give it back, it fell over and I couldn’t contain myself
Videos in Order:
1. One of many failed attempts at reeling a sucker in.
2. My long and exhausting, yet totally rewarding WINNER.
3. A tutorial on how to properly hold a fish. I am clearly illustrating the wrong way.
