1/9/2005 03:46:23 PM|||paul|||Reservoir seagulls|||... in which I dedicate a week to alleviating the world's preponderant fish over-population problem.

So Schmee rounded up a posse to head down to Esperance for a week. The eight hour drive southwards seemed a simple affair after the 16 hour drive northwards to Karratha only a few weeks prior.

Fishing is a curious stimulant. The individual components that contribute to the experience are by-and-large activities one would normally consider laborious, frustrating or even boring. Were a person to invite me to a holiday where I predominantly burn in the sun (and let me tell you, I do burn,) catch my fingers on hooked barbs, get stung by march flies and dehydrate while fooling myself into thinking that there is a fish I can't see interested in the bit of meat I've put on a hook (placed so precariously it disintegrates and must be replaced every other cast) on the end of a line I've thrown ten meters or so away into the ocean, I'd laugh in their face and scrub them from my Christmas card list. When mixed in the appropriate proportions with beer and Cougar to formulate a fishing trip, however, they acquire a whole musty aura of hearty rugged goodness. Additionally, I don't send Christmas cards anyway.

The transformation is probably influenced by the same magical force that prevents fish-gut covered hook barb cuts from getting infected, or makes stinky bait eye-juice and black gore covered fingers sterile enough to eat sandwiches with without requiring cleaning (even though the ocean water would probably suffice for the job, who can be bothered?)

An additional benefit of the plan was that it also saved us money by providing us with sustenance that we wouldn't have to purchase with money. It worked perfectly. We must have reaped a full half-kilo of herring fillets at a monetary cost of no more than four bags of mulie and three full days of fishing. I haven't bothered to put a price on my own time before, but I trust that the cost of three days fishing was outweighed by the almost full plate of fish that was the end product. |||110525882030589564