Fishing in the local indoor pool

Things have been pretty go go go around here lately. Sick kids, renovation fun, Natalie went to Windsor this past weekend for two showers for my sister's upcoming wedding and hey hey today I think the heating contractor finished the total overhaul of our heating and cooling system. My man Gord from Basic Heating. Funny, but with the two of us working in the same house for about a month, I'm going to miss him. Now it's 30 minutes before midnight and I'm sitting in the kitchen as my midwife of a wife prepares some food and coffee and makes phone calls because it's looking like one of her clients is going to have a baby tonight. There's an air of nervous energy around our place as my wife paces back and forth while she and her preceptor midwife decide whether the client should go now to the hospital, should she wait, what. Meanwhile I'm going to use this as an opportunity to post some photos from my latest adventure in fatherhood, fishing in the Scadding Court Pool.

It sounds kind of insane, but somebody filled a local pool with fresh water and stocked it with dozens and dozens of rainbow trout, in something called the Gone Fishin' Project. For $3 a person the organizers give you a fishing rod and let you fish in the pool that usually accommodates lap swimmers and lifeguards. Until I was in the pool and saw the trout in the deep end I wasn't convinced. Was this going to be a joke? Some sort of installation art exhibit? Nope, here's your rod, here's the other fishing rod, here you go.

What a cool thing. Who dreamed this up? And how did the city ever let this happen? Hey, someone said, let's put fish in the public pool and let kids try to snag them. You'd think some city bureaucrat would say no, that's crazy. Instead, some city bureaucrat said, sure, why not. This is one of the reasons I love this town. We rolled into the pool around 4 p.m. It took maybe ten minutes to explain to the kids how they couldn't stand too close to the pool edge. Pretty soon Myron had his routine down—winding up the reel, letting out the line until the lure hit the bottom, then winding it back up. Penny and I wrestled around a bit as she tried to cast the line and I grew nervous about the hook — I have this complex about sharp things around my eyes. But pretty soon even Penner was sitting in my lap, looking into the water, watching the dark shapes flit around.

We got a couple of bites. The fish in the pool ranged from maybe six inches to a good foot and a half. I kept trying to get one of the Moby Dick-looking swimmers and figured I had one snagged but as soon as I jerked the rod the hook came out of the mouth. I ended up getting one that weighed maybe a half pound. Now the challenge was getting one for the kids. Penny was kind of oblivious about the catching aspect of the fishing. Myron seemed to want to get one, however. So I kept trying and failing to get one for him. After maybe a half hour the kids were getting bored and the son of the dude who seemed to be running things, this 16-year-old kid, he sauntered over and gently extricated Myron's rod from his hands in this very nice way and I don't know what this kid was doing that was so different from what I'd been doing, but he had a fish on the line inside 20 seconds.

I had visions of eating the trout. I had visions of being all manly, of walking into the house with the kids and the fish and announcing to Natalie that we'd gone out and gotten ourselves some dinner. And then frying the fish with some lemon or something.

But when it comes right down to it, fish are kind of gross. I never liked you, fish. You smell bad. You smell like fish. My kids were kind of fascinated, however. So there was this service, if you paid an extra 75 cents there was a guy who'd clean the fish -- throw out the guts, basically. We did that. The guy handed us a bag. A bag of fish.

Then we rolled the wagon home and I tried to fillet the fish, except I learned a butcher's knife doesn't function well for that. We conducted some anatomy lessons with the fish eyes and the gills and the mouth, and then I cut the head off one of them, the fish I mean, which seemed kind of wrong, and then when Myron asked to do it, it seemed even more wrong, I watched him work the blade through the fish spine and kept thinking about the story I'd read recently, about the study tying cruelty to animals to violent adults. Or something. Where is the line between cruelty to animals and just wanting to enjoy a good dinner? Anyway, because by this point I was fairly grossed out, I made a mess of the fish frying. This was the result.