It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, and just about everywhere else in the world. Alexi and I are more-or-less confined to the boat. We can go out for a walk, run or bike. And there are a few restaurants that have take-out - that we can eat out of Styrofoam containers on park benches. But overall, it is pretty boring these days.

To mix things up a bit, we took our new dinghy out fishing near Amelia Island this week. We were hoping to catch some Red Drum (ciaenops ocellatus), the official state salt water fish of Georgia. This fish is also called redfish, channel bass, spot tail, and puppy drum. I've tried puppy drum once in North Carolina and it was very tasty.

So, we took our new dinghy out past the multi-million dollar charter yacht (idled due to coronavirus lockdowns http://www.bigeagleyacht.com/ - $150,000 per week) and past the massive cardboard manufacturing plant (https://www.westrock.com/) to an anchorage with a large oyster bed and some abandoned wrecked boats. Alexi had a $20 WalMart fishing rod and reel and I was fishing with a $5 hand reel. With our shrimp as bait we were set for some fun. In total, we fished two days for probably five or six hours.

As always, fishing is a quiet activity. You drop the anchor, shut off the engine, throw in your line and wait. Since both days were sunny and warm, it was super relaxing to just watch the clouds go by and enjoy the fresh air.

Given all the quiet, it was a pretty big shock when Alexi screamed "I've got something and its big." Her rod bent so far I thought it might break. Just as the fish came close to the surface, it shot down and rolled of dozens of feet of line with the reel making a whirring sound that seemed to threaten total mechanical meltdown. After fighting the fish for 10 minutes, she finally got it close enough to the boat to see what it was. Then, we both screamed, "It's a shark!!!!" It was a juvenile hammerhead shark about three feet long and perhaps 30 pounds. And it was not happy.

As if that was not strange enough, I caught a small hammerhead shark the next day.

This is not quite as strange as it sounds. Adult hammerhead sharks will eat their young, so the juveniles must find shallow feeding grounds near the ocean for four or five years until they mature (up to 15 years for females). We were just a mile or two from the ocean and in a calm creek filled with crabs and (we were told) red drum. So it was a logical place for them to avoid predation.

Of course, we let the two sharks and dozens of small crabs we caught go. I did catch a small drum fish but it was not large enough for eating so we let it go as well.

It was a lot of fun getting out on the water in the dinghy, exploring the small creeks around Amelia Island.

And...I am really glad we do not depend on fishing to eat!