RangerDanger
New Member
This one's true.
Me and my hiking/camping buddies used to spend most free weekends camped out in an area in the Angeles Nat'l Forest.
A short hike from where we camped was a bitchen waterfall. Several cascades and a 3-story high drop.
There was a pond at the bottom of the waterfall. I was stunned one of the first times I went there to find trout in that pond.
It was very unlikely that the trout had swum up to that pool from the main part of the stream. And there were no trout in the stream above the falls. Which means sometime in the past a fisherman had caught some trout and hauled 'em up there and put them in the pond.
There were all sizes of trout. Fat 15 inchers to small fry, which means they were living and breeding in the pond.
We never failed to catch fish there. Unless we were gonna eat 'em within a few hours we threw them back in (we used single barbless hooks).
So one trip in we deciede before we left we were gonna have a trout dinner that night so we brought foil-wrapped potato's & corn and trout fixin's. Flour, spices, oil and a cast-iron skillet.
We set up camp, get good and high and hike to the pond to catch our dinner.
We we bummed when we got there. Someone the day before had caught all the fish and left them to die on the shore. They had caught all 9 of them and cut off the line and left the fish just lying there.
Leaving the treble hooks in meant that scavengers--racoons, coyote's, bobcats etc-- would have ingested the hooks along with the fish which would have most likely injured/killed them.
We spent the next 10 minutes cutting the heads off the fish and extracting the hooks.
And went to bed a bit hungry that night.
I still can't imagine what would possess someone to catch all those fish and leave them dead on the ground. The fish had probably lived in that pond for well over a year and had their own neat eco-system going, getting first shot at the bugs picked up above the falls.
All wiped out in a few hours.
I learned a valuable lesson tho. NEVER assume you're gonna catch fish. That's a sure way of getting skunked.
Me and my hiking/camping buddies used to spend most free weekends camped out in an area in the Angeles Nat'l Forest.
A short hike from where we camped was a bitchen waterfall. Several cascades and a 3-story high drop.
There was a pond at the bottom of the waterfall. I was stunned one of the first times I went there to find trout in that pond.
It was very unlikely that the trout had swum up to that pool from the main part of the stream. And there were no trout in the stream above the falls. Which means sometime in the past a fisherman had caught some trout and hauled 'em up there and put them in the pond.
There were all sizes of trout. Fat 15 inchers to small fry, which means they were living and breeding in the pond.
We never failed to catch fish there. Unless we were gonna eat 'em within a few hours we threw them back in (we used single barbless hooks).
So one trip in we deciede before we left we were gonna have a trout dinner that night so we brought foil-wrapped potato's & corn and trout fixin's. Flour, spices, oil and a cast-iron skillet.
We set up camp, get good and high and hike to the pond to catch our dinner.
We we bummed when we got there. Someone the day before had caught all the fish and left them to die on the shore. They had caught all 9 of them and cut off the line and left the fish just lying there.
Leaving the treble hooks in meant that scavengers--racoons, coyote's, bobcats etc-- would have ingested the hooks along with the fish which would have most likely injured/killed them.
We spent the next 10 minutes cutting the heads off the fish and extracting the hooks.
And went to bed a bit hungry that night.
I still can't imagine what would possess someone to catch all those fish and leave them dead on the ground. The fish had probably lived in that pond for well over a year and had their own neat eco-system going, getting first shot at the bugs picked up above the falls.
All wiped out in a few hours.
I learned a valuable lesson tho. NEVER assume you're gonna catch fish. That's a sure way of getting skunked.
Earth Child
