Teach a man to fish and you feed him
for life. Give a man a bowfishing set and puddle him into Amanda
Bynes, I swear to God.
Case in point, I missed the same damn
gar four or five times Sunday morning. Once, I was even able to glance the
arrow off the edge of the concrete dock, shattering my confidence
but, luckily, not my arrow. Each ploink in the water, the gar lazily
flitted further under the dock, taunting me. It was just about enough
for me to bleach my hair, pierce my face, and indulge in heavy
narcotics.
In all reality, I should have taken my
hostilities out on the few dozen stingrays in the shallows and
stacked them up like silver dollar pancakes, but it just didn't seem
sporting enough, especially when I was supposed to be helping clean
up the river house to rent this summer. If a kill was to be made, it
needed to be impressive enough to absorb the verbal beating that would surely
ensue for taking a Union Break. The gar just narrowly fit in that
category.
 |
| One of my first sheepshead when times were easier. Before bowfishing. |
Which brings us to the sheepshead, the
Ol' Convict Fish. The sheepshead is one of those fish, if you're a
real sportsman, you typically don't target between the ages of
13 and When You Have Kids. Don't get me wrong – they are fun sport
on rod and reel and delicious, to boot, but it is the equivalent of
rabbit hunting. Grander plans hop in the way of a good time, at
times.
I've caught, I don't know, hundreds in
my youth and hadn't given them much thought since then until I got my
PSE Kingfisher a couple Christmases ago and started marching down the
list of legal fish I could conquer with a bow. Actually, “conquer”
may be too strong of a term given my aptitude with a bow, or lack
thereof. In the last 2 ½ years, I've shot at dozens. I can
accurately describe to you with mouth noises what my arrow sounds
like when it misses a sheepshead.
What makes them such attractive quarry
– aside from their excellent table-fare and prison-uni stripes –
is their ability to hang around just long enough to make you think
you have a chance. They have a tendency to hang in the shallows and
feed along seawalls and pilings, stripping them free of barnacles
with their creepy baby teeth. They are slab-sided and appear
dim-witted, but once you make eye contact and start to anchor your
bow, they are gone in a flash leaving you with desperate, flailing shots at where the fish was a split-second earlier, sort of how I've always felt about trying to hit a baseball. It's frustrating.
So I was caught in this cat-and-mouse
game with a fairly large sheepster on Sunday. In between gar misses,
I'd catch him under the boat house, or at the end of the dock. In all
reality, it could have been different fish, but as a trophy hunter, I
believed I was after The One, heroically engaged in a Battle Royale of wits with what
amounts to an over-sized panfish. Each time I thought I'd have a
shot, he'd spook, either from my shadow or movement or wife yelling
at me to help her move some piece of heavy furniture.
Time was running out. As I was making
my last stalk along the water's edge, I notice the blue-gray tail of
homeboy sticking out from under the dock, high in the surface column
as he grazed on the piling. I pulled back the bow and gangster-leaned
to the side and plugged him without him knowing I was even there. I
reeled him out of the water and hauled him to my wife for her to
admire, pleading, of course, for her to put down
the box of family heirlooms and grab my camera.
EPILOGUE
I snuck back out and shot a mullet,
too.
