Saturday 6th June 2009 – Cold, Cowardice and Catfish

The weather warnings are threatening snow.  There is much talk of summer being over, and it's not entirely clear that they're joking.  Last week it was in the 90's, now it's almost freezing.  Nobody expects the green to last too long.  Humidity is not the problem here, it's the wind and the chill factor.

I had wangled my way into a fishing team: I was going to spend most of the evening out on the Milk River watching the Catfish Contest.  But my courage failed me.  It wasn't just the cold, it was the mud.  The Milk River got its name from Lewis and Clark thinking it was pouring into the Missouri like milky tea.  Everyone had been telling me that I needed to kit myself out properly to spend a day on the bank.  "You wait till the weigh-in", they said, "there'll be a lot of very muddy people there". 

So when I woke up and found a cold day, I decided that uploading and reviewing video, audio and photo files was a pressing task.

 

It was sufficiently cold to hold the weigh-in indoors.  I had to walk about a mile to get there.  I could easily have got a lift, but, as usual, I had misunderstood the instructions and thought it was just a few blocks away.  So I had to walk, in the cold.

When I got there, I couldn't find my team.  Asking after them, I was pointed at the stage: they were winning.  As the weigh-in progresses, the current winners have to sit on stage until they are displaced.  My team, who had only cost $90 in the Calcutta, had caught 13.7 lbs of catfish.  The Calcutta winner was going to get about $5000 dollars: I should have bid for them.

The teams keep the fish alive in giant cold boxes, which are set out in front, waiting to be weighed.  They are dumped into a crate and weighed, then tagged to keep track of them and dumped back into big aerated tanks.  They will be returned to the river tomorrow.  Teams who caught already-tagged fish had to record where they caught them.

It was generally felt that I had no chance of winning.  "There's some big hogs out there", they said, talking of the fish still to be weighed.  And there were.  Some fish weighed more than 10 pounds.  Catfish are particularly ugly.  Their ugliness seems to be a function of their size: really, really big catfish are really, really ugly.

When a team had caught a big fish it was weighed separately, after the total catch had been weighed, then there was a lot of holding it up to be photographed.  I thought it a bit cruel to keep them out of the water so long.  "Don't worry", I was told, "they're almost impossible to kill".  And when they finally got released into the big tank, they were instantly off, at speed.

I, on the other hand, stuck around, drinking beer.