Wow, how to lead this one off?
Back when I lived in coastal NC, one of the things I loved to do was go flounder gigging. In short, this is where you put a couple of submersible lights off the front of a small boat, then pole the shallows on a dark night, looking for the outline of a flounder in the sand and mud. When you find one, you gig it (a flounder gig is a small trident on the end of a long pole) and flip it into the boat.
It’s a world of fun, but it’s also sort of eerie out there. You can really only see what’s right in front of you and under the boat. Everything else is pitch black, and made blacker because the bright flounder lights kill your night vision. Things flit in and out of the circle of light, going from visible to invisible in a flicker. In the darkness and weird lighting, ordinary objects and sounds become unearthly. There’s been more than one night out there that my friends and I have sort of freaked ourselves out.
I don’t know if I’ve properly set the stage for the story my friend Chris Fullilove just sent me from coastal Texas (where flounder gigging is also popular). By the way, if the writing seems a little dramatic, consider that it comes from a small, local, free newspaper - the Seabreeze News, out of San Leon, TX. The tagline on their webpage describes San Leon as, “a small drinking community with a large fishing problem.”
You may want to click on the image to enlarge it if you can’t read the article.
Pretty crazy stuff, huh? Thanks, Chris!
Beastslayer
That’s wild. Are flounder gigs tougher than frog gigs? Because when I envision fighting off a hog with my frog gig, I envision losing in a really bad way.