116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Fish (and) food
Nothing better than fishing — for fun and as part of locally-sourced supper
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I like to feel the bite, set the hook and fight the fight. If that’s all there were to fishing, I would still be hooked.
But there is more. Fish are good to eat. Fresh-caught fish, handled, cleaned and cooked with care, are as tasty as the finest restaurant fare.
It’s hard to beat locally sourced food, additionally flavored by the whole “living off the fat of the land” thing.
Even if DoorDash ever came to Quasky, it could not bring flaky fillets hot out of the peanut oil, surrounded by sliced tomatoes, crispy fried Yukon gold potatoes and caramelized sweet corn — all harvested from the garden within the hour.
It’s hard to beat a one-person, one-mile supply chain.
Most of the fish I eat are walleyes from the Wapsipinicon. Though I seldom target them, they often frequent the same waters as my preferred quarry, the smallmouth bass, and they chomp many of the same lures, so I catch the occasional walleye incidental to my bass fishing.
During the summer, as a wading angler, I release all walleyes. Dragging them on a stringer through a mile or two of warm water would not qualify as careful handling.
I have no such reservations in the spring or fall when the water is cooler. Moreover, as the water cools in the fall, the walleyes often become easier to catch than the bass.
Though anglers tell me they catch crappies in the Wapsie, I seldom do — presumably because I don’t fish in the deeper, slower, snag-filled waters where they live.
Apparently, however, they do occasionally live where I fish.
On Nov. 13, targeting smallmouth bass as always, I caught a nice crappie on my first cast of the morning. Fluke, I figured, as I tossed it back. My second cast, to the same spot, yielded another nice crappie — another fluke, I thought, as I released it. When I caught a third nice crappie on my third cast, I put one and one and one together and put it into a bucket.
Maintaining my one-to-one cast-to-catch ratio, I soon had seven thick-backed 9- to 11-inch crappies in my bucket — enough for supper and more than enough to tax my fillet knife skills.
I caught and released a dozen more, just for fun, and they still were biting when I left to clean fish.
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