Fishing Terms

Sticking with an animal theme this week (so far, anyway) ... saying "fish are more intelligent than people give them credit for," Dr. Dean Pomerleau of Los Angeles has trained his goldfish to play soccer, rugby, football, and do the limbo. Under water, of course.

But that's hardly news. Gosh, my grandpa could have told you that fish were smart after an evening of trying to entice one onto a sharp hook on Lake Missaukee.

And hey, remember I'm running a second post of "You Know You're Getting Older When..." this Friday. So if you can finish that sentence with a humorous conclusion, please let me know soonest!

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A FEW FISHING DEFINITIONS

HOOK - (1) A curved piece of metal used to catch fish. (2) A clever advertisement used to lure a fisherman to spend his life's savings on fishing supplies. (3) The punch administered by said fisherman's wife after she learns what he spent their life's savings on. (Usually accompanied by word "right" or "left.")

LINE - Something you give your coworkers when they ask how your fishing trip went.

LURE - An object that dangles from the end of your fishing line and is supposed to encourage fish to bite it. It is the fisherman's equivalent of sports cards, comic books, buttons, lint, and other things you collect that generally have no purpose.

REEL - A weighted object that causes a rod to sink quickly when dropped overboard.

ROD - An attractively-painted length of fiberglass that keeps an angler from ever getting too close to a fish.

TACKLE - What your last catch did to you right after you brought him into the boat and right before he jumped back overboard.

TACKLE BOX - A box shaped alarmingly like a good first aid kit, only a tackle box carries an extremely large number of sharp objects, so that when you reach in blindly to grab an adhesive bandage, you soon find that you will need more than one.

TEST - (1) The amount of strength a fishing line afford an angler when fighting fish in a specific weight range. (2) A measure of your creativity when trying to come up with yet another explanation for why you have come home once again empty-handed.

[selected from landbigfish.com with edits and additional material by Mark Raymond]

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WORDS for YOUR WEEK: "All the romance of trout fishing exists in the mind of the angler and is in no way shared by the fish." (Harold F. Blaisdell)

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