The Patriot Post® · In Search of Small Fish

Champagne wine was invented in the northernmost region of France by the Champenois, though Dom Perignon is widely credited as the gentleman who perfected the production of the sparkling wine best known for New Year’s Eve and wedding toasts.

As a native of the South who is well acquainted with all manner of genuine pit BBQ, one of the great revelations passed to me by a true culinary genius was the fact that champagne is a perfect pairing with hickory smoked BBQ. So l then gained a new reason to thank Dom and the French for introducing us to this delightful beverage.

The magnum bottle, essentially two standard bottles in one, is said to have a better wine to oxidation ratio and thus produce a more delicate, slower-aging, flavorful beverage.

As a lifelong fan of high-performance automobiles and motorcycles, I remember when American racing driver Dan Gurney surprisingly took Ford to victory at Le Mans in 1967. At the victory podium, he shook up a magnum of champagne as he was awarded his trophy and sprayed it from the podium.

He later observed: “What I did with the champagne was totally spontaneous. I had no idea it would start a tradition. I was beyond caring and just got caught up in the moment.”

So long live the magnum. Bigger is better, right?

It depends.

Another true passion of mine is fly fishing, which has taken me around the country in search of productive waters. Generally, when campfire talk with likeminded anglers reaches the five-minute mark, stories and comparisons of the largest and toughest fish ever caught will flow as freely as the rivers we just fished.

It was the blue marlin that author Ernest Hemingway featured in his classic novella, The Old Man and the Sea. The fisherman in this story battles a blue marlin, a scene inspired by Hemingway’s own marlin fishing adventures while he was a resident of Key West, Florida.

So the last campfire competition in which I was a participant was “won” by the gentleman who claimed to have boated a 700-pound blue marlin while on a charter that originated out of Key West. He regaled us with the tale of how the fight lasted for hours and the captain had to nearly back the boat to Cuba just to land the trophy.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner. Right?

That depends on mindset and perception. Are we preoccupied through culture that bigger is better? And does that very mindset increase or decrease our enjoyment of any given pursuit and indeed life itself?

Two of my most memorable fishing trips took place in Southeast Tennessee and involved catching the smallest fish I have ever caught. In both instances, the locations were spontaneous, driven by heavy summer rainstorms that produced high and muddy water in our chosen locations. So as not to be denied our day of fishing, my companion and I searched for alternatives.

We picked the location on a topographical map. Nothing more than a tributary of our home river, it was picked simply because of its high elevation. Our theory was that the rain had stopped an hour ago, so due to gravity, that tributary should be running clear.

And clear it was. As always, the native brook trout were spooky and highly suspicious of anything that didn’t look exactly like their typical prey. It took considerable time and many fly changes to finally discover the fish would take a fly that mimicked a black ant or beetle. Each of the three brook trout caught would fit in the palm of your hand, but the difficulty in catching them made these little guys trophy fish.

As my friend Mark Alexander has observed regarding the nature of earnest pursuits, “The thrill is not the kill, it’s the hunt.”

Our second “small fish trip” also took place after heavy rains muddied our favorite trout stream. In this case, without the time to bushwhack high into the mountains, we simply chose to put our float tubes in on a small creek that paralleled a county backroad. The creek emptied into a lake in the area so we didn’t expect it to hold trout.

There were indeed no trout, but that tiny creek held ravenous panfish that didn’t care what fly you presented. Each of our first casts caught fish, as did most subsequent casts.

We floated with the current for a half hour until the rain began again in earnest. We caught scores of small panfish in that time, and when we got back to the truck we were laughing like two adolescent schoolboys who had just gotten away clean with a big prank.

My turn at the campfire came after the 700-pound blue marlin story. So I followed with: “Toughest fish I ever caught? A 10 ounce brook trout…”

I don’t think anyone cared much for my “big story.” But those tiny brook trout were perfect, rare, and beautiful — and a reminder to be thankful for what we have and not constantly be obsessed with the “bigger is better” mindset.