A Very Fishy Story! Rob and his Shenanigans.

Rob and I lived in the city for years, but had chosen to buy a farm in Lydenburg, Mpumalanga. On the farm we had a few dams, one of which had fish (Black Bass) living in it. Now Rob and I are not great fishermen, we tried to fish just about every spare time we had, but to no avail.

This was very frustrating for Rob and I, there was one Bass that was much bigger than the others, he tended to lie near the surface where we could see him; so Rob and I named him, “Mr. Big”. Now Mr. Big was a crafty old Bass, we would dangle the hook in front of his mouth, and he would move to the side of the hook, then again we would dangle it in front of him, and again he would swim to the side of the hook. Anyway, months passed and still no luck.

We had just finished a days work, when I told Rob I really would love a piece of fish for supper, the only problem was we lived 40 kilometres out of town, and in those days the shops still closed on a Sunday. So guess what? Rob had no option but to go fishing. So off he goes with his fishing rod to try his luck, while I went home to soak in a lovely warm bath.

About an hour later Rob comes home full of the joys of spring, and shouts out to me that he has at last caught the fish, and that he would clean and bake it for us. He hands me a glass of wine and promptly shooshes me off to the veranda while he got on with the cleaning and cooking.

Eventually he calls and tells me dinner is ready. Well!! I must say that Rob had cooked the fish to perfection, I enjoyed every mouthful, until the third last bite when I nearly broke my tooth on something hard, not wanting to hurt the chefs feelings, I said nothing, it did look a bit suspicious though. I took another mouthful and lo and behold it happened again. I couldn’t keep quiet any longer, so I told him what had happened, he looked at me and promptly started laughing, he laughed so much his tears were splashing all over the place, and I thought that any minute now he was going to fall off his chair.
I asked him if he was going to share the joke with me, he got this guilty look on his face and said “Love the damn fish would not bite, so I shot Mr Big with a shotgun ”

Now I know why I was kept out of the kitchen. The poor fish probably looked like a sieve, and Rob had known, if I knew it was Mr. Big, I certainly would have said no to dinner; specially if I knew he had been blasted from the waters with a 12 gauge shotgun.