I told this one to Randy, Dwaynez and Mudcat Lee at the last muster.....now I will tell the rest of you guys.....

Back in 1989, while going to that fine institution of higher learning......up in College Station Texas, my roomate and I decided we were going to spend the week of spring break fishing at Lake Livingston. Neither of us knew anything about fishing, but I had a brother that fished all the time and who had a boat and all the necessary tackle for us to borrow.

My brother told us to go to the island in the south part of the lake and fish the backside of the island and that this is where we would find all the fish.

We picked up the boat, drove to Livingston and stayed at Wolf creek. First morning, we launced and rode across the "white capped" waters to the island. We made it to the island and, while floating in about 1-1/2 ft of water, could see all kinds of fish with whiskers. Not knowing anything about fish, we assumed whiskers..... so it must be a catfish. There must have been 50 or so in the water....all about 18 to 24 inches long and good sized bodies. We cast everything in the tackle box and they wouldn't even look at it.

My buddy was starting to get a little green around the gills so we headed in for the day.

We went to the closest marina to find out what catfish are attracted to. The old boy at the marina looked at us like we had 6 heads and said that it was too early for spawning and doubted that these were catfish. We assured him otherwise.....claiming to have seen the "motherload" of fish and needed some bait for them. He sold us some frozen shad to try the next morning.....we also bought a net. We figured that if we couldn't catch with rod & reel, we would scoop them out of the water with the net.

we went back out to where the fish were. they wouldn't go for the shad either. we could get up behind them with the net either.....every time we would try, we ended up hitting the tail and missing the fish. My buddy decided to lean over the rail and smack one with the boat oar. After hiting one square in the midsection.....it stunned itfor a second and then swam off. We looked at each other and decided that if it could make it through this, we probably didn't want any of these in the boat.

Needless to say, we did not catch anything. We went back to the bait shop and described, in a little better detail, what we had seen to the old boy. He asked us a few questions.....

he said...did these fish have short whiskers on the bottom of their mouth? we said yes they sure did.

he said...did these fish have a checkered pattern on their sides? we said yes they sure did.....the biggest cats we had ever seen.....

he looked at us with that "you don't know much" look and said....those ain't catfish.......they're CARP!!!!!!

You could read it in his face.......these two boys are the dumbest Aggies I ever met......LOL

That night......coons ended up eating the rest of the frozen shad. We didn't catch anything and ended up going home early.

Somewhere, I have a picture of the two of us holding up a shad like it was our catch of the day......