F
Field Ethos
Guest
By Roger Pinckney
Sheep-head.
Find you a dock or a bridge, easy enough on the Carolina Coast. Bust off the thimble barnacles and those thumbnail-sized oysters from a piling with your oar-blade. Bust off lots of them, make a chowder of saltwater shell and meat. Drop your bait into the low-tide, slack-water slurry, alongside the piling you just busted the chum off of.
Count to 10. No twitch in your rod?
Don’t matter. Reel in cause your bait is gauran-damn-teed gone.
Sheep-head.
You almost got to smell them bite, those buck-toothed, convict-striped, bait-thieving recidivist devils. Recidivist, a good word for a sheep-head, a repeat offender, steal bait till you get tired of giving him the chance.
***
Say “sheep-head,” no matter how it’s spelled. And don’t ever you call spot-tail bass redfish either, unless you pay 400 bucks a half-day to turn them loose. Then you can call it anything you damn well please.
Talking about spot-tails now. We eat them, only when legal of course, though we have been known to cut off the illegal part now and then as hungry men will do. In my youth, I’ve hauled them ashore, 50, 60 at a time, one five-pounder on each hook of a double-drop bottom rig, the limit at the time being determined only by the ice on hand and your fondness for butchering. You clean a half-dozen fish, you butcher thereafter. Barefoot, cut-foot, free and wild, run the beer right through the A&P till alongside the skeeter-scat, bacon and beans, what a grand time to be a boy. But I was telling you about sheep-head, not spot-tail bass.
***
You catch sheep-head with fiddler crabs, or at least you try.
But first you gotta catch the fiddlers. Great herds of them bunch up on south-facing mudbanks every late-summer, low-tide afternoon. If you are blessed with three 6-year-olds, you might be able to convince them running down and catching fiddlers one at a time is fun. Lacking the help or inspiration, you go to Plan B:
Bog down the mudflat about 30 yards in front of the fiddler herd, bury a 5-gallon pail on its side about half in the muck, take two 8-foot sticks of 1X4, place them in a “V” with the small end at the buried pail, walk a good distance away so as not to spook the herd, then drive them into the bucket, extract the pail full of fiddlers from the mud, and you’re ready to fish.
This is an effective way to get a month’s supply of sheep-head bait, even if you don’t really need it. But there is one major disadvantage: It only works in late summer and sheep-head have been hungrily hunkering beneath docks and bridges since mid-May.
And then you’re stuck with a shovel and one fiddler at a time.
***
Miss Evonne was the only female motor-grader operator in South Carolina, a singular achievement of which she was quite proud. She could also throw a cast net better than any person—male or female—I have ever known. But when the sheep-head showed up under the county dock the second Sunday in June, Miss Evonne was stuck with the shovel-and-one-fiddler-at-a-time method. A dozen fiddlers lasted as many minutes and when she caught a glimpse of one larcenous convict sucking a fiddler right off her hook, she was seized with a sudden inspiration. “I’m fixing to drop a net on them skutters.”
And she did.
But alas, after only one throw, she was unable to retrieve the net. “Hung up on barnacles,” she reckoned, “happens all the time.”
No worries, she tied the net off to the railing. Her supervisor was due on the island on Monday, and he’d be happy to help get her net back. But the net was not hung up. It was too full of dinner-plate sheep-head for Evonne to lift.
“Roger, we took the morning off, bought a 12-pack and butchered fish instead. We split ‘em fifty-fifty and let me tell you, I ain’t never gonna chase another fiddler again.”
***
The South African blew ashore here a number of years ago, furthest he could get from his ex-wife, he says. He took up with Randy, outboard mechanic and sport-fishing guide, and they both took up with me as I had a deer lease. Wasn’t much money involved, just cover the liability insurance. But there was sweat equity, roads kept open, firebreaks maintained, and a block of woods set ablaze each spring. And both of them brought me treats, a jug every Christmas, venison salami, pastrami and sheep-head, lots and lots of sheep-head. There seemed to never be an end to the sheep-head, trimmed and clean fillets frozen in vacuum bags.
“How you boys manage to catch all these sneaky bastards? Tell me your trick.”
The South African looked at Randy, Randy looked at the South African, and they both grinned. “We stick ‘em,” Randy said.
We stick mullet and spot-tails down here, out on moonless, low-tide winter nights with a long gig and a Coleman lantern hung low over the water. “Stick ‘em?”
“Not with a gig, Mate,” the South African said, “with a compound bow.”
“What the hell?”
Randy took it from there. “Yep, a spinning reel mounted on the bow, rubber fletching on the arrows and a broadhead with wings to keep it from backing out. Chum the water like you always do and when a fish rises to the top….” He went through the motions of a draw and release, “shook, you got him!”
The limit is 10 fish per man per day with a 30-fish limit per boat.
I like my sheep-head broiled until barely done. Butter, lemon and a dusting of Old Bay, they taste every bit as good as crab, as appropriate from all those stolen fiddlers.
The post Smelling the Bite appeared first on Field Ethos.
Continue reading...
Sheep-head.
Find you a dock or a bridge, easy enough on the Carolina Coast. Bust off the thimble barnacles and those thumbnail-sized oysters from a piling with your oar-blade. Bust off lots of them, make a chowder of saltwater shell and meat. Drop your bait into the low-tide, slack-water slurry, alongside the piling you just busted the chum off of.
Count to 10. No twitch in your rod?
Don’t matter. Reel in cause your bait is gauran-damn-teed gone.
Sheep-head.
You almost got to smell them bite, those buck-toothed, convict-striped, bait-thieving recidivist devils. Recidivist, a good word for a sheep-head, a repeat offender, steal bait till you get tired of giving him the chance.
***
Say “sheep-head,” no matter how it’s spelled. And don’t ever you call spot-tail bass redfish either, unless you pay 400 bucks a half-day to turn them loose. Then you can call it anything you damn well please.
Talking about spot-tails now. We eat them, only when legal of course, though we have been known to cut off the illegal part now and then as hungry men will do. In my youth, I’ve hauled them ashore, 50, 60 at a time, one five-pounder on each hook of a double-drop bottom rig, the limit at the time being determined only by the ice on hand and your fondness for butchering. You clean a half-dozen fish, you butcher thereafter. Barefoot, cut-foot, free and wild, run the beer right through the A&P till alongside the skeeter-scat, bacon and beans, what a grand time to be a boy. But I was telling you about sheep-head, not spot-tail bass.
***
You catch sheep-head with fiddler crabs, or at least you try.
But first you gotta catch the fiddlers. Great herds of them bunch up on south-facing mudbanks every late-summer, low-tide afternoon. If you are blessed with three 6-year-olds, you might be able to convince them running down and catching fiddlers one at a time is fun. Lacking the help or inspiration, you go to Plan B:
Bog down the mudflat about 30 yards in front of the fiddler herd, bury a 5-gallon pail on its side about half in the muck, take two 8-foot sticks of 1X4, place them in a “V” with the small end at the buried pail, walk a good distance away so as not to spook the herd, then drive them into the bucket, extract the pail full of fiddlers from the mud, and you’re ready to fish.
This is an effective way to get a month’s supply of sheep-head bait, even if you don’t really need it. But there is one major disadvantage: It only works in late summer and sheep-head have been hungrily hunkering beneath docks and bridges since mid-May.
And then you’re stuck with a shovel and one fiddler at a time.
***
Miss Evonne was the only female motor-grader operator in South Carolina, a singular achievement of which she was quite proud. She could also throw a cast net better than any person—male or female—I have ever known. But when the sheep-head showed up under the county dock the second Sunday in June, Miss Evonne was stuck with the shovel-and-one-fiddler-at-a-time method. A dozen fiddlers lasted as many minutes and when she caught a glimpse of one larcenous convict sucking a fiddler right off her hook, she was seized with a sudden inspiration. “I’m fixing to drop a net on them skutters.”
And she did.
But alas, after only one throw, she was unable to retrieve the net. “Hung up on barnacles,” she reckoned, “happens all the time.”
No worries, she tied the net off to the railing. Her supervisor was due on the island on Monday, and he’d be happy to help get her net back. But the net was not hung up. It was too full of dinner-plate sheep-head for Evonne to lift.
“Roger, we took the morning off, bought a 12-pack and butchered fish instead. We split ‘em fifty-fifty and let me tell you, I ain’t never gonna chase another fiddler again.”
***
The South African blew ashore here a number of years ago, furthest he could get from his ex-wife, he says. He took up with Randy, outboard mechanic and sport-fishing guide, and they both took up with me as I had a deer lease. Wasn’t much money involved, just cover the liability insurance. But there was sweat equity, roads kept open, firebreaks maintained, and a block of woods set ablaze each spring. And both of them brought me treats, a jug every Christmas, venison salami, pastrami and sheep-head, lots and lots of sheep-head. There seemed to never be an end to the sheep-head, trimmed and clean fillets frozen in vacuum bags.
“How you boys manage to catch all these sneaky bastards? Tell me your trick.”
The South African looked at Randy, Randy looked at the South African, and they both grinned. “We stick ‘em,” Randy said.
We stick mullet and spot-tails down here, out on moonless, low-tide winter nights with a long gig and a Coleman lantern hung low over the water. “Stick ‘em?”
“Not with a gig, Mate,” the South African said, “with a compound bow.”
“What the hell?”
Randy took it from there. “Yep, a spinning reel mounted on the bow, rubber fletching on the arrows and a broadhead with wings to keep it from backing out. Chum the water like you always do and when a fish rises to the top….” He went through the motions of a draw and release, “shook, you got him!”
The limit is 10 fish per man per day with a 30-fish limit per boat.
I like my sheep-head broiled until barely done. Butter, lemon and a dusting of Old Bay, they taste every bit as good as crab, as appropriate from all those stolen fiddlers.
The post Smelling the Bite appeared first on Field Ethos.
Continue reading...