Jewelry, Fishing, Music, and A Crawfish boil! Retirement is a Busy Time!

It’s been a crazy busy week! Last week started off slow as it was too nasty to go fishing and so I taught a refresher wire wrapping class with our neighbor, Sue. She’s a retired art teacher and quickly remembered her lesson from last year!

The next day, I had hoped to go fishing but the weather was too windy for my kayak. Instead I was talking with my fishing buddy Terry, when a neighbor drove up and asked me if I wanted to go out in his boat! Of course, I said yes, and we were soon heading out across the five-mile-wide bay heading to San Jose Island.

We anchored and Bob had a bite on his first cast! He missed it but throwing back to the same spot his bobber disappeared and he set the hook on a nineteen-inch red fish. Now a nineteen is one inch short and so it went back into the water, a good release!

My turn was next as my bobber started to swim away and I set the hook on a nineteen-inch black drum, (black drum are one of my favorite eating fish)! Soon Bob was onto another black drum, but this one was twenty-three inches, a great fish. Not to be out done I caught two the same size before Bob set the hook and landed the biggest fish of the day, a twenty-seven-inch black!

We barely got back in time for the free concert in our clubhouse. One of our friend’s son, Kevin Motsinger entertained us with two sets of Country and Gospel music.

He has a good voice and he sure knows how to pick his guitar! He had already put on an impromptu concert that afternoon, so it was great to see forty people in the audience.

Saturday the weather turned windy, too windy to fish, so Renita and I worked on getting ready for this weekends Gulf Coast Gem and Mineral Show! It’s the first big show of our year and it is also an opportunity for us to buy needed gem stones.

I did have to take a break as Terry, Dave, and I went to the local fish market to pick up our order of shrimp and crawfish. Sunday we were having a crawfish/shrimp boil and o we needed two coolers for twenty pounds of shrimp and thirty pounds of crawfish. I asked the lady behind the counter about keeping them alive overnight and she said that wasn’t her job, that once they left the store it was our responsibility, (so I looked it up on Google). Suffice it to say I will never buy any seafood there again even though it’s the main seafood place in Rockport/Fulton.

The next day Jane and Dave organized the boil, cleaned the area, set the tables, and we started cooking. The potatoes and corn were first and when they were done, we put them into a cooler. Next came the shrimp, after pouring a huge bag of spices into the boiling water. They only took three minutes, most people cook them too long, and while Dave was doing that, I was purging the crawfish.

Now to purge them you cover them with water, some add salt which only kills more crawfish, and them stirring them with one of our kayak paddles. As you stir them the dead ones float up to the top and you cull them and throw them away.

We had a lot of dead ones, about ten pounds, and John came over and helped me pick out the live ones. Into the boil they went and after five minutes, (we did three batches), dinner was ready.

Now it’s always difficult to cook Cajun food for so many mid westerners and so we told the people to wash them off if they were too spicy. It really didn’t matter, as the crawfish and shrimp were excellent! It was a great boil and a lot cheaper then going to a restaurant.

The rain has started again today and if it stops and the wind dies down, I hope for a few hours in the kayak. Thank you to Bob, Kevin, Dave, Terry, Jane, John, Dan, and of course Renita. It was a great week!  Clear skies