COLORADO RIVER BOYS

I had lunch with two very entertaining brothers who grew up and still live on the banks of the Mighty Colorado river. I've been good friends with one of them for nearly six years now, an extremely likeable and moral fellow even if he is a defense attorney. I know their parents very well, and they are the kind of folks that make and that made America great. Hard working. Not afraid of working just all the time to have a good life for their family and their children and grandchildren. Successful yet frugal.

So I met the brother today, a real estate man who tournament fishes and is quite reknown as a great fresh and saltwater fisherman, apparently excelling in every milieu and genre, if you will, of the various fishing available in and around Texas.

I got to see some cool bowfishing pics from a Colorado fishing adventure, when Willy Bob says that the rice farmers get to take water out of the Colorado and the levels drop drastically, reducing eight foot "holes" to four foot, and that something else happens at this time that results in an amoeba kill off that renders the waters much more clear and easy to see through.

One bowfishing pic had a monster carp that had been bowfished and took a long and arduous fight to land. I forgot to ask them what they did with it, and I guess I should have done my old standard joke about my secret receipe for carp/gar/hardhead catfish:

1. marinate filets or steaks of carp/gar/hardhead catfish in a fifth of Jack Daniel's Black for 24 hours.
2. Throw away the fish and drink the whiskey.

Which, I'd have to guess never havin' actually tried that marinade, that the Jack Black would be awful nasty after 24 hours with fish that I suspect does not smell all that great.

But they both have some great stories about varied fishing throughout the state. Ricky Bobby, the newly met brother, is charasmatic as hell and tells a great fishing story. He and I have run through a lot of the same East Texas fishing grounds and had a lot in common. Ricky Bobby has done a lot more hard core fishing in a year than I ever have in total, so I figure there's a few more things I could learn from him. I learned several today.

Ricky Bobby's reputation as a fisherman and sportsman greatly preceeded him, but it also unlocked a bunch of stories from his brother Willy Bob. I knew Willy Bob was an outdoorsman and did some fishing but he too is far more experienced than I, and we share a lot of common ground as far as the fishing we like to do, even though we grew up about 100 miles apart in different yet similar parts of Texas.

I didn't get to tell them my gator stories, and I bet they have a few of their own. If you've done any fishing of note or frequency in both fresh and saltwater/brackish bays in certain parts of Texas, you're gonna have dealt with alligators. Although most gators I've seen would go to great lengths to avoid human contact, there are some who seek it.

I saw a recent Maneater show where their experts claimed it was because they had been fed food by humans and lost their fear of them. Whatever. I don't care for gators. Some of the brackish back bay waters around Matagorda and Anahuac and the other places in the bay systems where I've seen gators are places where wade fishing in certain areas is not advisable.

So I'll bring up gators the next time I see the brothers. I really want to take a night fishing trip down the Colorado with them, doing some catfishing and bowfishing. It'd be an interesting trip and I'd get to see some semi-isolated country along this historic river. I'm not sure if there are gators in the Central Texas portion of the Colorado that the brothers frequent, but with their plentiful East Texas and Upper Gulf Coast fishing experiences, they've no doubt got some gator stories.