Pelican Fishing

 

Adventure Location: Decatur, Al

Adventure Date: 12-21-2022

Pelican: 4 -6 ft wingspan, about 10 pounds.

The big freeze starts tomorrow and tonight we have a story for you from my old friend DC. DC and his wife PC are wintering in Rockport Texas. It is well known that Rockport has good fishing from the shorelines around there. So DC decided to head on down to the harbor and try out a new fangled fishing lure to see what happens.

DC is a good fisherman so the OFM was expecting to hear all about the fantastic catch he made. Well it was fantastic. As is frequent down there it was a foggy morning at the boat docks in the harbor. So DC went to work trying out the new lure. He was working it across the water in the fog when out of the fog came a full grown pelican and grabbed the lure. Naturally the hook did its job and it was fight on.

For those that have never wrestled with a pelican, they are big strong birds with claw like apenditures on parts of their body and they know very well how to use them. DC knows about pelicans. So he was being very careful to stay away from bird parts that were dangerous. He worked the large bird up to the parking lot wall and reached for his pliers to de-hook the bird. OOOOPS no pliers.

Now it is serious time. DC looked around and saw a harbor worker and asked if he had a set of pliers DC could use to unhook the bird. The worker did not have some but he put on his welders gloves and came over to help unhook the big bird.

Well they safely got the big bird unhooked and released without either DC or the worker losing any blood over the event. From personal experience against pelicans they got lucky.

DC got his lure back. The pelican got its freedom back without serious injury. And the worker and the OFM had a great story to tell everyone.

A word of caution hands on messing with saltwater shorebirds on the Texas coast is not a really good way of trying to have tooooo much fun.

Thanks for the story of the adventure DC. You are now famous all over blog land.