We loved camping in the mountains. We had a favorite spot, just a few feet from the clearest mountain stream you ever saw and not far from the trails where the men could take the four-wheelers. It was early summer and just getting warm enough to swim. We took our children ages 7 & 8 and met another couple and their child and pitched our tents for a long weekend.
The first day, the men went trail riding and we women took the kids to the stream. Sitting at the edge of the water, my friend and I noticed these tiny little fish. They would swim right up to you, or at least that is what it looked like. The water was so clear; it is really hard to say. Regardless, we decided to catch a few of these little fish to take home. We tried grabbing them with our hands, but they were too fast. We tried using a pot but they would swim away. We just could not catch one and they looked so close!
Later that evening, we all drove to a tiny mountain town not far from the campground to look around. There were a few old mountain men sitting on a bench in front of a general store and my friend and I asked them if they knew how we could catch those little fish. One of the old guys told us that they were called “mountain sun fish”.
He said for us to go into that general store and look on the wall, they had some plastic spaghetti strainers. He said for us to get us a yellow one. He said to go back and sit in the water, and to put the spaghetti strainer between our knees. He said to be real still. He told us the sun fish would swim to the yellow strainer and all we had to do want pull it up out of the water and they would be in the strainer.
We were very excited to head to the stream early the next morning, yellow strainers in hand. We each sat in the freezing mountain water with the spaghetti strainers between our knees. We sat as still as possible considering we were shivering and freezing. After a while, the little fish swam right up to us. We would wait patiently and when they looked to be right over the strainer, we would yank the strainers up. But we caught no fish.
We thought maybe we were sitting to close together so we moved. Then we thought we were not holding the strainer deep enough so we raised them. Then we thought they were too high, so we lowered them. In a couple of hours, we were blue. We were frozen from the waist down and still had not caught a single fish.
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