One more Pinetop story

After yesterday's post, I was kindly reminded by MBM that I forgot one story that needs to be documented.

First, let's set the scene....this is a picture MBM's hubby took of Hawley Lake. 

Beautiful, eh?

On Thursday, we went up to Hawley lake to see J's parents who were up there camping for the week.  We went down to the edge of the lake to fish for a while with MBM and her family, as well as my MIL.  J and FIL had gone out on the boat.  We fished.  And we fished.  And we fished.  And not even a nibble.  So after a while, we got bored of fishing.  We decided to do some crawdad fishing.  J and I had done this last year at Hawley lake and it was great fun.

What you do is put a good little chunk of bacon on the hook of your fishing rod and then dip it in the water near the shore of the lake.  The crawdads come out of between the rocks, clamp on to the bacon and then you pull them out of the water and shake them loose in a bucket.  We began to do this and were having a lot of luck, even got the kiddos involved and catching some. 

 In case you don't know what a crawdad looks like, this is a photo.  They are kind of mini-lobsters.

Here's a crawdad fishing photo MBM's hubby took of all of us. 

Meanwhile, we had just had lunch and the food was sitting in a grocery bag by the shore.  MBM's hubby was keeping watch, but every so often would walk away to tend to one of the kids.  As food does attract animals, we had a squirrel who was very interested in what was in the bag.  So every so often we'd hear the bag rustle and dag-nabit if that squirrel wasn't in the bag.  So MBM's hubby would run up and shoo him away and try to do something else so he couldn't get our food.  But he was a persistent little bugger.  The food was hung in the tree (although, I'm not sure how he thought that was a good plan seeing as squirrels naturally climb trees), and the food was even wrapped in a towel and put in the bag, but that squirrel already knew it was there so he kept coming back. 

At one point, MBM's oldest son (Big E) had grown weary of crawdad fishing so he had just put his child's fishing rod (kind of a toy fishing rod) down on the bank with the bacon attached to it.  By this time, MBM and I had wandered pretty far down the bank because we had caught a bunch and were cleaning out the crawdad population so we needed new area.  MBM's hubby and youngest son (Lil E) had come with us.  Pretty soon, Big E comes down and says, "Daddy, the squirrel is back!"  So MBM's hubby takes off to get the squirrel out of the food.  What Big E didn't tell us was that instead of getting the food in the bag, the squirrel was actually getting the bacon on Big E's hook!

So MBM's hubby rushes back to find the dag-nabit squirrel holding the bacon filled hook between his little paws and going to town on the bacon. Now he didn't want the squirrel to hurt himself on that hook so he picked up the pole and tried to yank the hook away, however at that same moment the squirrel was taking a bite and MBM's hubby actually caught the squirrel on the hook!  Well then the little guy freaked out because I'm guessing he had never had that happen before and took off running.  This caused the line on the kid's fishing pole to take off too and because it was a cheap little pole it wasn't the easiest to stop. 

So MBM's hubby is trying to reel the line in so he can get the hook out of the squirrel but at the same time (realizing the humor in the situation) trying to grab his camera out of his back pocket.  And neither was going very well!  Eventually, MBM's hubby (who apparently I need to come up with a name for!) gave up on the reel and just grabbed the line and started bringing the squirrel in to him so he could figure out how to get the hook out of the little bugger's cheek.  Apparently the squirrel didn't thing this was the best idea so just as he was about 2 feet from MBM's hubby, he made one last mad dash away and out came the hook.  The hook was pretty clean, no patch of fur or anything, but somewhere at Hawley lake there is a squirrel with a hole in his cheek! 

Here's a photo MBM's hubby took before the incident escalated!

Cute little guy eh?  He's a demon that one!

Anyway, MBM's hubby now has a story that I would bet few people have to share.  He caught a squirrel on a fishing hook!

Now are you happy MBM?! Love ya!

Oh and as for the crawdads, we had quite the little feast. 

Here's one cooked.  I know he looks big but he really doesn't have that much meat. 

After probably catching 75-85 crawdads and after probably an hour of MBM and I taking the shell off them and cleaning them, it only amounted to this much to eat. 

However, it was a lovely side item to our steak for dinner.

Great times...and I could see it happening again next year...we'll see if there's a few extra children along for the ride!