Oh my poor paws...

Everyone has to whinge about something. As I'm no longer a full time farmer, I get let off whinging the weather non-stop - which has it's downsides. I mean, it's an easy call, like wearing a uniform for work liberating me of my hard decision of what to wear (OK I lie. Jeans, a t-shirt (top of the pile) and blue tartan flannel shirt if it is cool. On dress occasions green tartan flannel shirt.) But I do believe some people who have closets full of clothes struggle with this, and don't have a thing to wear either. Go naked. Trust me, if you don't have a thing to wear, that's the obvious choice.

My whinge today - I can already see the deep sympathy in the fishermen among you's little beery brown eyes - is that my poor little paddy paws are too raw to squeeze tea-bags. Normally my hands - from years of cooking and treating my hands like delicate flowers, climbing, crayfishing, digging holes etc... are not even aware that a teabag is hot.(Yes, I know. I'm a teabag squeezer. A sin, a stain on my character, and life-time ban from the tea-snob society.) but we had a good session fishing on Saturday, and my little paws are somewhat abraided by that nasty rough cord. Can't they make it extra-soft?

I fish, for Flathead mostly with a hand-line. 2.5 mm braided cord, 3 7/0 hooks and half pound sinker. Not exactly or precisely IGFA competition rig, but quick and effective for a guy who fishes for food. Cheap too, and not hard to maintain or repair (my fishing buddy on the day has enormously expensive carbon fiber rods, and $500 dollar reels and fire-wire line. And he uses teeny-tiny hooks to catch more. On days when the fish are shy we tend to catch about the same. On days when they're not... I catch twice what he does.) Small hooks catch more fish, but big hooks don't break and don't really catch many small fish. When there are lots of fish about, I go big hook sizes.

The downside (for my whinge) is that pulling up line/fish is just you and gripping that somewhat abrasive wet line -wet with nice skin-softening seawater. And drift fishing in 30-40 meter water, means you typically have 50 meters of line out. Now we had a good day, and a lot of folk who don't get to sea or are getting on the elderly side for fishing got fish teas... but that was 60 fish, all between 1-2 kg. I caught more than 40 of those, and a few gurnard-perch (nasty toxic spines) we didn't get spiked by, and a gummy shark that was let go as too small. So 40 X 50 - that's two kilometers of abrasion, with more than 1kg being pinch gripped. That's without the times you haul in and lose the fish or re-bait.

So maybe there is something in these newfangled 'reels'. But it was a great day's fishing. We've had lousy conditions for a while, and the freezer was getting low on flatty fillets. And I've now paid back or paid forward a lot of our chain of produce gifts.