Mike Schoonveld

I saw a friend’s Facebook post recently in which he was showing off his first ever Chinook salmon.
He said it weighed 16 pounds then explained he’d hooked another but it tangled in a downrigger wire and broke off. He then reported, “The captain said it was easily 20 pounds.”
I posted a comment to his remarks, “Every salmon that breaks the line and swims free weighs at least 20 pounds.”
Obviously, that’s not always the case, but it’s almost impossible to prove. Almost!

I remember the first fish I ever caught that someone cleaned for me and I got to eat it. My grandpa laid the tiny sunfish on the counter, used a spoon to scrape off the scales, chopped off the head and slit the belly open to pull out the entrails.
My dad wasn’t a fisherman and grandpa didn’t live close so I was mostly a self-taught angler. And since that’s how I was taught to clean fish and since the local ponds near my hometown were full of small sunfish, that’s how I cleaned fish I caught for the next dozen years or so.