ARKANSAS SPORTSMAN

Fish-on-a-stick makes tasty treat

Roasting a whole crappie over a campfire on a stick is an unusual, but easy way to enjoy these tasty panfish.
Roasting a whole crappie over a campfire on a stick is an unusual, but easy way to enjoy these tasty panfish.

My brother-in-law said he knew he’d found the girl he was going to marry when she showed him how to cook fish on a stick over a campfire.

It’s just like roasting a hotdog, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

I saw this trick performed live last weekend while camping with my family and a bunch of in-laws at Petit Jean State Park.

We arrived Friday evening to find the expansive campground almost full. Fortunately we reserved two sites in advance. Despite obviously heavy use, the campground was very clean and well-maintained. We did not see the usual carpet of cigarette butts, beer can tabs and wrappers that litter campgrounds in the national forests and at the Buffalo National River. The absence of poison ivy was most welcome.

Our campsites were on pretty steep slopes that dropped into a small ravine, but that’s not a problem if you sleep, as I do, on an air mattress. That’s because they self level. My daughter Amy avoided that problem altogether by sleeping in her Hennessey A-Sym Cub hammock.

The bathhouses are also very clean, including the commodes, despite heavy and frequent use by all manner of people.

The atmosphere in Loop C was festive, but not rowdy. There were a lot of small children and a lot of riding toys, but the children were all very well behaved, and all of our neighbors were pleasant.

About the only opportunity for sportsmen at Petit Jean Mountain State Park is fishing at Lake Bailey. It’s a shallow lake on the mountaintop that covers about 160 acres of what was once a small farm. It contains largemouth bass, channel catfish, bluegill, green sunfish and crappie.

Fishing information about Lake Bailey is scarce, but I did find a thread about crappie fishing at crappie.com. Somebody posted a question about crappie fishing there, and the consensus response was “don’t bother.” One person wrote that it was hard to fish because the little bitty bream won’t leave your bait alone.

The crappie fishing is actually pretty good. Some friends brought us a limit they caught by trolling small jigs. Most of the crappie were about 10 inches, with one good 14-inch slab and a largemouth bass to spice things up. The females were full of eggs, but they were all a bit skinny, which suggests insufficient forage to support a robust fishery. Each fish yielded two nice fillets that were the perfect thickness for frying, and after we returned home Miss Laura outdid herself with some outstanding fried crappie.

During the campout, however, we took the challenge to try Mika Giggleman’s famous Fish-on-a-Stick. First, my son Matthew sharpened some sticks. Then we impaled the intact fish through the mouth and out the tail with the sharpened stick. It is not necessary to clean the fish, and you don’t scale it.Blacken the skin and scales by holding it over the campfire and turning it often, like a rotisserie.

Cooking is complete when the skin blackens. You can peel the skin away with a fork. This will expose the meat. Salt and pepper to your satisfaction, and eat down to the bones. Don’t go any further or you’ll get into the viscera. My niece did that to gross out her cousins and, to her great delight, she succeeded.

Cooked in this manner, the meat is white and flaky and also very moist, but without the calories and cholesterol of frying.

We broke camp at first light Sunday morning and got off the mountain before the storm hit.

We never dreamed it would be so bad, and our thoughts are very much with those who suffer.

Sports, Pages 21 on 05/01/2014

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