Reading the marrow spoon thread, I became aware of the fact that I’d never seen such a thing as a marrow spoon and went Google imaging. In the course of this, I saw something called a “priest”, which is apparently used by anglers for the purpose of administering a coup de grace to the fish. I don’t quite understand how this is done, however, since the only Google entries that come up want to sell me one, not explain how to use it.
Is it just a heavy club thing that you use to bludgeon the fish to death? Is is some sort of punch thing that you hole it in the brain with or something? The bludgeon thing made sense to me when I thought it could possibly be the size of an actual mace or something (none of the shopping pages I got to showed it in scale with anything), but then I noticed marrow spoon/priest combos and realized it couldn’t be that big. And if it’s only the basic size of a marrow spoon, then how does it pack enough wallop to kill a fish in one blow?
As mentioned, a “priest” is a club. The name also has a resonance with the historical idea that clergy weren’t supposed to shed blood, so they carried a mace or club into battle instead of a sword.
BTW, these only work up to a certain size fish. If I was halibut fishing, I’d carry a .38.
I have a really interesting fishing knife that fits this category. It has a big heavy knob on one end, to kill a feisty fishy. It’s a folder, and it has several notches in the back of the blade, marked with weights. If you hang it by the lanyard in the handle, the knob acts as a counterweight. You can wrap fishing line from a fresh-caught fish around one of the notches to weigh the fish. It’s made by Puma.
I doesn’t have to be a fancy club. We used a stick to bash the skulls of trout so they wouldn’t flop around in the boat and to save them from suffering.
Where exactly do you club a fish to incapacitate it? Whenever I catch walleye/pickerel, I have a heck of a time killing them short of cutting off their head. I’ve tried clubbing the top of their head, but it’s covered by a thick plate and they don’t seem to be bothered.
It’s very unnerving to be in the middle of filleting a fish and have him suddenly thrash under the knife.
I just can’t resist a hijack now to mention a mondegreen of mine: I recently purchased Katy Lied by Steely Dan, which has a song called Black Monday on it, which contains these lyrics:
I heard it as
So perhaps you use an archbishop while ice fishin’!
