Fishing in Korea

The other weekend we went on a Korean family vacation with a friend of ours.  The vacation was amazing and I will try to talk about pieces of it as we go, but one major aspect of the trip was fishing.  Our friend who we went with was obsessed with fishing.  We went to a remote part of the countryside with a beautiful river so clear that the water looked blue!  The first night we arrived, our friend wanted to try fishing for catfish.  Catfish apparently only like to be caught in the middle of the night.  Thus began our search for a place to fish for catfish.
The first spot we went to was perfect.  It was close to the place we were staying and our fisherman saw a fish!  He had a glowing bobbin on his line so he could see it in the dark, and we watched that little light go up and down for a long time.  He was the only one of us who really knew, or really wanted, to actually fish.  We just watched and spoke in hushed tones.  Actually, the fisherman's girlfriend started watching a tv show on her smart phone. 
After a while he looked for fish again with a flashlight, and the one fish he had seen decided to swim away.  The next hour was spent going from one fishing spot to the next.  One had too little water, one already had two fishermen, until we ended up driving up a mountain to a stream.
It was so beautiful there!  If only we could have actually seen anything...  The stars were amazing, and when I took a picture with a flash I would see a clear, blue pond at the end of a cascade around white rocks.  There were fish there!  They were just about 1 cm long.

The next day was more successful.  We went net fishing!  This involved putting a net next to a medium-sized rock, and the guy with the giant crowbar would go to the other side and wiggle the rock.  Any fish hiding would dart away into the net.  It was pretty effective.  About 1 out of 4 wiggled rocks produced fish.  The fish were about 5 inches long on average.  Some were generic fish, some catfish, and some eels.  It was a lot of fun just wandering around the river, once your feet got to numb to notice the cold.  We caught a good number of fish, and I wasn't sure what they were going to do with them.  One thing about koreans, they use every part of the animal/plant.  I knew they weren't going to go to waste.  Once we got back to the house, the women (there were a team of sisters cooking all the meals) made a spicy soup with chunks of radishes and kimchi.  Then they dumped some of the fish in whole!  I didn't see it, but our friend said one was trying to swim!  We got bowlfuls of the soup once it was done cooking.  Then we ate the fish whole, tiny bones and all.  They were so young and cooked it was like eating canned salmon bones.  I ate the head last... 

Us net fishing.  We are both in the picture, Riley is helping with the net and I am wandering.

So, that is our fishing experience in Korea! It started dark and ended yummy!