What did this man need that he didn't have?

[JacksSmirkingRevenge]

Well, I caught a catfish on dry land the other day. Fucking walking catfish, a quarter mile from the nearest water. Just a little dude, maybe 14 inches long.

That sounded so mad I had to look it up.
Far out!

[mistermack]

Well, I caught a catfish on dry land the other day. Fucking walking catfish, a quarter mile from the nearest water. Just a little dude, maybe 14 inches long.

That sounded so mad I had to look it up.
Far out!

Eels do the same thing. Baby eels travel along the tiniest water courses, that you wouldn't even know was there, but bigger ones go overland, and will travel miles on wet nights, and end up in isolated ponds and lakes that have no outflow at all.

Then, when they have grown to full size, up to a metre, they travel back over land, the way they came. All they need is a wet night, or even daytime through wet grass. They eat slugs and worms as they go along.

[piscator]

Mistermack - how many buckets of elvers do you think you caught? How much did you charge for a gram? How many grams have you sold?

[Cormac]

There's a little bit of the gun-moron in everybody.
We evolved it. It's not surprising that it's there. Using weapons is what made us a successful species, so it's bound to have had an effect on the evolution of our brains. It's perfectly natural for a weapon to make you feel safer and stronger, and be an attractive thing to own.

It's just a question of how much, and whether people ever grow up and grow out of it.

We have inherited lots of instincts that were useful in the stone-age, which are now bad, and we need to repress.
You see it at football matches, we control the natural tribal aggression. Or the instinct to rape, we now suppress it.

This weapons instinct is in the same category. It's obsolete in a civilised society, but it's still there. There's no shame in experiencing it, but it's the morons who wallow in it, and define themselves by it.

Funny how often seemingly obsolete behaviours are needed in the modern day.

[JimC]

There's a little bit of the gun-moron in everybody.
We evolved it. It's not surprising that it's there. Using weapons is what made us a successful species, so it's bound to have had an effect on the evolution of our brains. It's perfectly natural for a weapon to make you feel safer and stronger, and be an attractive thing to own.

It's just a question of how much, and whether people ever grow up and grow out of it.

We have inherited lots of instincts that were useful in the stone-age, which are now bad, and we need to repress.
You see it at football matches, we control the natural tribal aggression. Or the instinct to rape, we now suppress it.

This weapons instinct is in the same category. It's obsolete in a civilised society, but it's still there. There's no shame in experiencing it, but it's the morons who wallow in it, and define themselves by it.

Funny how often seemingly obsolete behaviours are needed in the modern day.

Needed occasionally, and best left to the specialists, at least as far as committing general mayhem goes...

However, I'm not truly with mistermack on this - guns, specifically hunting rifles, can be a hell of a lot of fun if used correctly and responsibly, and it is enjoyable to master them, and become a reasonably good shot. To do so is not being a moron...

My issues with Seth and Collector re guns lie elsewhere...

[mistermack]

Mistermack - how many buckets of elvers do you think you caught? How much did you charge for a gram? How many grams have you sold?

Elvering has changed enormously since the sixties. People only catch less than one percent of what they used to catch, but the price is sky high now, so they actually make more money today, because they are sold live for re-stocking rivers and lakes, and to fish farms.

In the nineteen fifties and sixties, you could come home with ten or fifteen gallons of elvers. I can remember we used to have a container on wheels, similar to a small to medium chest freezer, and that would be full of elvers.
But even though you could catch huge quantities, you couldn't make much money, as they didn't sell for high prices then.
We took it round the housing estates, and sold them by the pint. Most people would buy one or two pints of elvers.
They were really popular, but the season only lasted a matter of weeks.

You would fry them in a pan, with chopped bacon and scrambled egg.
The price was very low then, it was a cheap seasonal food in this area.

Things have totally changed now, today, the price is amazing, but you can only catch tiny quantities now. Even so, there are very large numbers of people who fish for them, because of the high price.

Years ago, they were only caught to eat. Nowadays, they are far too expensive to eat.
I live just a few miles from a village called Frampton, and years ago, they would hold a fair, and one of the highlights was ''the world elver eating championships'', one of those events where several dozen people would eat as much elvers as they could. It had to stop when the price went through the roof. They tried to keep it going, eating spaghetti instead, but it wasn't the same.

God knows how many elvers are in a gallon. A phenomenal number anyway. They are absolutely tiny when they arrive at Gloucester. They actually get bigger as they travel up the river.

[piscator]

Mistermack - how many buckets of elvers do you think you caught? How much did you charge for a gram? How many grams have you sold?

Elvering has changed enormously since the sixties. People only catch less than one percent of what they used to catch, but the price is sky high now, so they actually make more money today, because they are sold live for re-stocking rivers and lakes, and to fish farms.

In the nineteen fifties and sixties, you could come home with ten or fifteen gallons of elvers. I can remember we used to have a container on wheels, similar to a small to medium chest freezer, and that would be full of elvers.
But even though you could catch huge quantities, you couldn't make much money, as they didn't sell for high prices then.
We took it round the housing estates, and sold them by the pint. Most people would buy one or two pints of elvers.
They were really popular, but the season only lasted a matter of weeks.

You would fry them in a pan, with chopped bacon and scrambled egg.
The price was very low then, it was a cheap seasonal food in this area.

Things have totally changed now, today, the price is amazing, but you can only catch tiny quantities now. Even so, there are very large numbers of people who fish for them, because of the high price.

Years ago, they were only caught to eat. Nowadays, they are far too expensive to eat.
I live just a few miles from a village called Frampton, and years ago, they would hold a fair, and one of the highlights was ''the world elver eating championships'', one of those events where several dozen people would eat as much elvers as they could. It had to stop when the price went through the roof. They tried to keep it going, eating spaghetti instead, but it wasn't the same.

God knows how many elvers are in a gallon. A phenomenal number anyway. They are absolutely tiny when they arrive at Gloucester. They actually get bigger as they travel up the river.

Shame you guys depleted the resource like that.

From a paper on eel farming, 2 cubic meters=120kg @ .3g/elver = ~400,000 elvers... which is about the total of pink salmon of my 2 best years of 19 seining in Prince William Sound.
Black cod (sablefish) average about 4lbs ea, so my 20,000lb IFQ averages about 5000 sablefish/yr since 1996.
The halibut are bigger, with 1000-1500 going to make my 40,000lb quota (we don't target big breeders).
Then there was a couple seasons longlining Pacific Cod @ 1/2 million pounds each of say, 5lbs per after heading and gutting. Say 200,000 P-cod.
The 1/2 million or so pounds of opilio tanner and red and blue king crab I caught in 2 1/2 seasons pot fishing the Bering Sea I won't count here, because crabs aren't fish. Similarly, the 30-50,000lbs/season of cod we trapped for crab bait I don't really count either.
But the sac roe herring I've harvested in Togiak and Sitka really start to add up when you consider 100 tons at a time with a 4-6oz average size per fish=640,000 herring in 100 tons. I've never caught less than 100 tons in a season x10 seasons seining sac roe Pacific herring, and my best to date has been ~350 tons (2,240,000 herring).

Toss in some sport fishing - this year for example I have ~200 sockeye and 50 coho fillets frozen, and an even gross of 1/2 pint jars of smoked sockeye, and a cubic meter or so of frozen rockfish and lingcod fillets (a cubic meter being about 28 cubic feet, or a standard 21cft chest freezer + a 7.4 cft "small" chest freezer). Then there's the halibut I keep from sportfishing and what I squirrel away from comfishing, about the same volume as the rockfish, although it's in a commercial cold storage facility - and I may be close to you in raw fish numbers, but have thousands of times the volume and thousands of times the mass of fish.

So it might be fair to say I've caught "more" fish than even you.

[Cormac]

There's a little bit of the gun-moron in everybody.
We evolved it. It's not surprising that it's there. Using weapons is what made us a successful species, so it's bound to have had an effect on the evolution of our brains. It's perfectly natural for a weapon to make you feel safer and stronger, and be an attractive thing to own.

It's just a question of how much, and whether people ever grow up and grow out of it.

We have inherited lots of instincts that were useful in the stone-age, which are now bad, and we need to repress.
You see it at football matches, we control the natural tribal aggression. Or the instinct to rape, we now suppress it.

This weapons instinct is in the same category. It's obsolete in a civilised society, but it's still there. There's no shame in experiencing it, but it's the morons who wallow in it, and define themselves by it.

Funny how often seemingly obsolete behaviours are needed in the modern day.

Needed occasionally, and best left to the specialists, at least as far as committing general mayhem goes...

However, I'm not truly with mistermack on this - guns, specifically hunting rifles, can be a hell of a lot of fun if used correctly and responsibly, and it is enjoyable to master them, and become a reasonably good shot. To do so is not being a moron...

My issues with Seth and Collector re guns lie elsewhere...

Well, as for general mayhem, and obsolete behaviours, back in the 90s, my brother and I got attacked by a gang of 6 guys led by a girl. It was on Christmas Eve around 10pm. The girl had a lump of lead on a piece of string that she was swinging at our heads.

Luckily, my brother and I had trained heavily in martial arts, and while the fight went on for nearly 15 minutes, because of our training, we came out of it nearly without a scratch. It was extremely violent. We gave them several opportunities to back off. The guys tried to back off a few times, but each time she led them back for more.

Many would consider fighting skills to be a barbaric anachronism. I don't.

That girl was responsible for a large number of serious assaults. She eventually went to prison for shoving her stiletto heel into the eye of a girl she'd just beaten to the ground.

There are malevolent scumbags out there. I think, young people in particular need to know how to defend themselves. In the first instance, this means, usually, getting away as quickly as possible. If that is not possible, if you're not able to defend yourself, you're fucked.

Older people (late 30s plus) are not as exposed to this kind of risk.

[piscator]

...
Many would consider fighting skills to be a barbaric anachronism. I don't.

...

Martial arts combine psychology, meditation and concentration, flexibility, strength and endurance fitness, and the development of complex skillsets for practical use. A craft that can be taken to an art form, and has in many different ways.

I'll be an old man before I can't throw a good roundhouse knee to the lateral femoral, then a left hook to the brachial plexus, then a right cross to the mandibular angle right below the ear, then hobble away on my cane. That's always good to know.

[Cormac]

...
Many would consider fighting skills to be a barbaric anachronism. I don't.

...

Martial arts combine psychology, meditation and concentration, flexibility, strength and endurance fitness, and the development of complex skillsets for practical use. A craft that can be taken to an art form, and has in many different ways.

I'll be an old man before I can't throw a good roundhouse knee to the lateral femoral, then a left hook to the brachial plexus, then a right cross to the mandibular angle right below the ear, then hobble away on my cane. That's always good to know.

Or just deliver a few good whacks with your trusty cane!

[piscator]

...
Many would consider fighting skills to be a barbaric anachronism. I don't.

...

Martial arts combine psychology, meditation and concentration, flexibility, strength and endurance fitness, and the development of complex skillsets for practical use. A craft that can be taken to an art form, and has in many different ways.

I'll be an old man before I can't throw a good roundhouse knee to the lateral femoral, then a left hook to the brachial plexus, then a right cross to the mandibular angle right below the ear, then hobble away on my cane. That's always good to know.

Or just deliver a few good whacks with your trusty cane!

They'll expect that.

[JimC]

Cormac wrote:

Well, as for general mayhem, and obsolete behaviours, back in the 90s, my brother and I got attacked by a gang of 6 guys led by a girl. It was on Christmas Eve around 10pm. The girl had a lump of lead on a piece of string that she was swinging at our heads.

Luckily, my brother and I had trained heavily in martial arts, and while the fight went on for nearly 15 minutes, because of our training, we came out of it nearly without a scratch. It was extremely violent. We gave them several opportunities to back off. The guys tried to back off a few times, but each time she led them back for more.

Many would consider fighting skills to be a barbaric anachronism. I don't.

That girl was responsible for a large number of serious assaults. She eventually went to prison for shoving her stiletto heel into the eye of a girl she'd just beaten to the ground.

There are malevolent scumbags out there. I think, young people in particular need to know how to defend themselves. In the first instance, this means, usually, getting away as quickly as possible. If that is not possible, if you're not able to defend yourself, you're fucked.

Older people (late 30s plus) are not as exposed to this kind of risk.

I was really referring to the need to leave guns (aside from recreational and hunting purposes) to the police and military, not martial arts as such...

[Cormac]

Cormac wrote:

Well, as for general mayhem, and obsolete behaviours, back in the 90s, my brother and I got attacked by a gang of 6 guys led by a girl. It was on Christmas Eve around 10pm. The girl had a lump of lead on a piece of string that she was swinging at our heads.

Luckily, my brother and I had trained heavily in martial arts, and while the fight went on for nearly 15 minutes, because of our training, we came out of it nearly without a scratch. It was extremely violent. We gave them several opportunities to back off. The guys tried to back off a few times, but each time she led them back for more.

Many would consider fighting skills to be a barbaric anachronism. I don't.

That girl was responsible for a large number of serious assaults. She eventually went to prison for shoving her stiletto heel into the eye of a girl she'd just beaten to the ground.

There are malevolent scumbags out there. I think, young people in particular need to know how to defend themselves. In the first instance, this means, usually, getting away as quickly as possible. If that is not possible, if you're not able to defend yourself, you're fucked.

Older people (late 30s plus) are not as exposed to this kind of risk.

I was really referring to the need to leave guns (aside from recreational and hunting purposes) to the police and military, not martial arts as such...

Well, it was simply luck that one of those guys wasn't killed, or severely disabled. I did not hold back at all, except with the girl - which was a lesson learned.

[mistermack]

Shame you guys depleted the resource like that.

Quite right. But It's fisheries departments who are meant to manage stocks, not the fishermen.
Anyway, a lot of the reduction in individual catches is down to the huge increase in numbers of people fishing for them. The total catch is spread over hundreds of times as many people.

Years ago, not many people did it, because of the low price and the effort of taking them round the houses selling them. Now they just go to the elver station and weigh them in.

From a paper on eel farming, 2 cubic meters=120kg

You need to start again, and find another paper that actually knows what it's doing.
2 cubic meters = 2 metric tonnes, or 2,000 kg. Where the hell did you get your figures?

@ .3g/elver = ~400,000 elvers...

Again, I don't know where you get your figures from, but 0.3 gm sounds far too much.
Technically, the eels caught south of Gloucester are not elvers, they are glass eels, and they become true elvers as they grow. But everybody calls them elvers.
As I said earlier, they get bigger as they move up the river. But glass eels are small compared to true elvers.
Of course, you will get elvers that weigh 0.3gm at some stage as they grow. But I would be very surprised if they weighed anywhere near that when they are caught here.
The river severn is probably unique in that you can catch glass eels with a net.
It's only possible because they are carried up the river by the famous Severn Bore, a tidal wave that comes up the river twice a day. On most rivers, the fish have to swim up, under their own steam, so they have grown to be much more mature and bigger by the time that they are catcheable.

I've seen elvers at Tewkesbuy, just ten miles up the river from Gloucester, and they are much bigger, and starting to go black.

Anyway, I don't really care who's caught the most fish, I just thought you'd find it amusing or interesting. But from a purely academic point of view, I would say that catching fish with huge machinery as part of a team, it's a bit of a questionable claim that you caught the fish.
Whereas holding the net in your hands, and lifting them out of the water personally, is genuinely catching fish yourself.

[Seth]

Well, I caught a catfish on dry land the other day. Fucking walking catfish, a quarter mile from the nearest water. Just a little dude, maybe 14 inches long.

That sounded so mad I had to look it up.
Far out!

Ebbilution!

Next dey be driving Prius'!