Lazy Sunday Afternoon

I needed yesterday, on several levels. I spent yesterday from dawn to dusk with my friend Harry fishing, shooting the shit, lounging on the Sacramento River, drinking wine and eating fish. No projects, no appointments, nothing but a lazy Sunday.

I also needed the lesson in adaptive cooking I got when it came time to make dinner. More on that later.

Harry lives in the Delta, right along the Sacramento River, behind a levee. On the other side of this levee is a gigantic pump that keeps water flowing through a narrow backwater slough. When this pump goes off, a horizontal geyser of water blasts into the Sacramento River. The noise of this geyser underneath the water must sound exactly like a dinner bell, because striped bass and catfish come from nowhere to eat the yummy bits blown into the river by the outflow.

Harry’s plan was to fish by the pump when it went off, only when we arrived we saw enough leftover water splashed everywhere to see that it had only recently blown. Grrr… Plan B was to fish for catfish in the river, so we back to the house and hitched up Harry’s jet boat.

Yep. That’s a Canada goose with flames coming out of his ass. Harry’s boat stands in defiance of all the over-chromed, useless, floating gasoline tanks that dominate the Delta once the sun gets high. We are fishermen, and we hate “boaters.” We see no reason to be on the water wasting gas unless dinner is to be had. Harry’s boat sends the same message to pleasure boaters that the Deathmobile did to Faber in “Animal House.”

So we’re soon tooling up the river debating whether we should buy some crayfish. Harry is of course practical: ”If we don’t catch any fish, we can eat ‘em.” Then he looked upstream. “Shit!” The pump had just gone off! Harry put the throttle down and we rocketed over to the spot.

Oddly enough, the best way to fish it was from the bank, so we anchored the boat and began fishing directly into the froth. We each cast Rapalas, a little rattling lure that looks like a minnow with two treble hooks attached to it. One cast, two casts, three, four, five — BZZZZZZZ!! A striper hit my lure hard and set the hook on itself.

Catching a fish in this torrent was interesting, as I had no idea how large it was because the current was hurling the fish backwards. Then it swam up-torrent and got tossed a foot into the air. I reeled in hard to keep tension on the line and heard Harry shout, “That looks like a keeper!” And so it was. I got the fish to the bank and, lacking a ruler, used a dollar bill I had in my pocket; a bill is six inches long, so if the striper was longer than three bills, it was a keeper. An inch to spare.

I scrambled back to the boat to put the fish on a stringer when Harry hooked another fish, definitely another striper.

Unfortunately for us, Harry’s striper was only 16 inches, so he let it go. So long as the pump was going, we would get strikes — there’s nothing quite like the mania that hits when you know that during this tiny window of time you have an infinitely better chance of catching fish than in all the long hours ahead. The closest feeling is that first half-hour before sunrise in the duck blind, when all the birds are still flying.

Then, as soon as it had arrived, the gusher stopped. We cast a few times aimlessly, but no more strikes. Time for catfishing. We knew that would be slow, as the very best catfishing is done at dusk, but we still thought we’d catch a few. Though we didn’t really take things too seriously. Had we done so we would have bought chicken livers or crayfish for bait, instead of sardines, which are more the fare of the striped bass.

I have never caught a catfish in California before. Caught scores of them in Virginia, plenty in Minnesota and two on a vacation in Baja several years ago. But never here. I still haven’t caught one, but Harry did: A little white catfish, whose elders can reach 90 pounds.

After that, we toyed with bait-stealing striped bass that were no longer than your hand, but brought nothing more into the boat.  Which was fine, as we were mostly out there to swap stories, plan our fall hunting seasons and talk about cooking and eating wild game. Besides, Harry had some abalone back home.

Harry is a sensible person. He is not an abalone diver. Every year a few ab divers either drown or have a nasty encounter with the Man in the White Suit, who cruises those waters looking for sea lions. Harry stays in water shallower than his head, and tips down into it looking for the lovely limpets; he is the puddle duck of abalone hunters.

But he still gets his share, and we decided to eat this one in what is still my favorite method: Pounded flat, floured, egged, rolled in bread crumbs and fried in oil. We thought we’d grill the striper whole, which is how I cook all my striped bass that are too small to fillet. We’d have rice and a couple ears of corn — and a bottle (or two) of Chardonnay made by Bogle, a winery less than a mile away.

Harry is a bachelor who lives in a large house with two other bachelors. I knew I would need to keep things simple, as none of the three are serious cooks. “Where’s your breadcrumbs?” I asked. “We don’t have any,” Harry replied. Hmmm… so we toasted some bread, but it was still too moist. Fail. “Ok, do you have any crackers?” What kind? Saltines. Harry just laughed.

OK, how about flour? Nope, but Harry did have Jiffy biscuit mix. Garlic? Ah, there were four heads on the windowsill. I picked them up and they were as light as air — totally dessicated. Harry saw me prepping the striper. “Well, I know this is going to mess up your presentation, but our grill is only about this big,” he said, noting that I’d need to cut off the fish’s head and tail. Really? Really. So I did. Olive oil for the fish? Nope. I used Wesson.

Harry did manage to scare up a package of Ritz crackers and about a half-cup of flour, and he did have eggs, so the abalone cutlets were going to be exactly as I wanted them. He also had two limes lying around from a recent bout of Tequila drinking, so I added that to some butter and a little of the Chardonnay we were drinking for some lime butter to go with the striper.

It all worked out just fine. Harry’s roomate Joe joined us for dinner, and we gorged ourselves on fried abalone — chewy and meaty and damn, damn good for a snail’s foot I’d say — the striper, grilled with lime butter, jasmine rice and a couple ears of corn, all washed down with wine. A simple, perfect little feast for a simple perfect little Sunday.