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Large Mouth Bass and Channel Catfish@ Austin Texas

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username_taken Newbie

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Long time since I've posted. I've had the week off work to hang out with my friend who's in town promoting his new ( and first ) book release Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast

With plenty of time off I've had the chance to do a bit of fishing ( been working 70+ hour weeks for as long as I can remember, so not much energy for fishing ) ... First trip was uneventfual with just a few small panfish, nothing to write home about.

This morning however I went down to my local pond with a chunk of bacon ( home cured of course! ) as bait.

Within a few short minutes my rod buckled over and up come a catfish. This was repeated another three times and I was feeling pretty good at myself after not really expecting to catch anything decent from a pond I can walk around in ten minutes.

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Things went quiet for a bit and I sat back and went to pick up my book to have a read when suddenly my rod buckled over and started to tear line off the spool. I grabbed the rod ( which is the rod I won @ the '09 ( or was it '08? time is a blur ) hinze dam camp/comp. and made sure the hook was properly set and went about hauling it in.

Didn't feel like a catfish, nor a carp which seems to be the only other decent size fish in the pond. The fish was giving some really energetic runs ran than the tug tug of a catfish. Eventually I got it close enough to see a flash of silver and wooot! it was a Large Mouth Bass! and quite a nice one at that. I coaxed him up gently to the bank and pulled him up out of the water.

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all in all I ended up with 6 catfish and the bass. All on barbless hooks and all kissed and returned.

also a few days earlier I discovered a cache of wild grapes ( known here as Mustang Grapes ) not very edible raw ( a little too acidic, been known to cause skin irritation ) but quite cool to process. I made a really nice pink wild grape verjuice out of unripe grapes ( they should ripen up at the end of the month ).

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username_taken Newbie

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Mate, cool post!!! So does your mates book cover Australian things as well? Very interested!

Congrats on the LMB!

Cheers,

Ryan.

It's pretty US centric, but then again a lot of the concepts and ideas are the same no matter where you are. it's kind of a food lover's primer for Foraging, Fishing, and Hunting.

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Rocket75 Newbie

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Howdy Paul, Long time no hear :)

Great to hear that you are doing well over there (but working too hard by the sound of it)

I can tell you were suprised by that bass capture, are they native to the area or would it be a stocked fish that has made its way there to eat bacon and play with catties and carp?

I hope you find yourself out fishin again soon and look forward to more US reports ;)

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username_taken Newbie

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Rocket: he's definitely stocked, nothing in that pond is native ( man made pond ) however he's obviously been alive and in there for a good number of years. They stock it with bass, catfish, and also rainbow trout in winter. plus there's a bun'ch of random smallish fishes.

ellicat: the catfish here are pretty edible ... in fact there's a 'restaurant' just down the road from me called 'The Catfish Parlour' which serves nothing but fried catfish. They're farmed a lot here, and the farmed ones don't taste all that great, but a wild ( or stocked lake ) one in a healthy system tastes prety good. normally fried, but grilled with soy/honey like the japanese do eel is also really good, and they smoke up pretty good too.

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