Fishing has been interesting lately, not to mention great.
In the past two weeks, I have had to play doctor with two fish.
The first was a bass that had something orange trailing out of its rectum. It was several inches long, and my first guess was an intestine. Wrong, it was what appeared to be a Berkley, ribbon tail power worm. It was a simple, straightforward matter to gently extract the foreign object by pulling slowly. No surgery required.
The second was more interesting. It was a large bass that took the bait deep, requiring a certain measure of skill to remove it without causing further damage. Besides the bait protruding from its gullet were four objects, two green, one black, and one orange. My first guess was some type of gross tumor, but I was wrong again.
Using my curved hemostat, I was able to remove four plastic worms from its throat. My guess is that during the fight, the fish tried to regurgitate them, as bass are wont to do. That enabled me to rid the bass of the non-digestible plastic.
In addition, two bass had bloated bellies. While removing the bait the one and one half inch wide tail of its meal was waiting for the gastric juices to provide room so it could finish its journey to the fish's gut.
I'm left wondering what happened to the hooks of those five baits.
