Another weekend of fishing

I came home from a weekend at the camper really early because of the storm. The whole time I was there it was raining on and off which made fishing hard to do. On saturday when the rain slowed down we got in the boat and tried to some nice size crappie in hopes of cooking them for dinner. At first we paddled around the lake and got hit and all the crappie were the same exact size with almost no distinction between them. We circled the island to catch the fish and we would put some of them in the bucket that we planned to fillet later. Well when we got to one side of the island a giant snapping turtle came up the the surface for air. The hed on this thing was massive and I told Chris to look and his first reaction was to cast over it. Next thing we know the turtle freaks out and dives under the surface and Chris' pole just about bends in half. He got it up to the surface once and we noticed that the hook had to be on his side based on how he was swimming. While Chris was trying to real him in I had to row the boat towards the dock so when he did come up we could get the hook out. After about 5 minutes the hook had bent to the point where it no longer stayed in and he reeled back the rest of his line. Even though we couldn't get a good look at his up close it was fun to try to see what it looked like. But other then that moment in the boat nothing else really happened while fishing. We didn't catch any bass bigger then maybe 10 inches. And the only reason we caught those was based on the size of the mimic minnow we used for the crappie.
Once we came back in from fishing it was time to fillet the large amount of crappie we had caught. I did the first 2 and passed the knife to Chris to finish the rest. Filleting fish is the most annoying part and crappie tend to be exceptionally slimy making it more of an annoyance. But we got almost all of them filled and threw a few back we didn't want to cut up. The plan was to try and cook them with tempura batter since it has always been so good in the sushi I've had. We had got onions to fry as well since there would be a lot of batter. And the cooking process couldn't have been more annoying while in the camper. It took use about an hour to figure out how long to fry the onions and at one point we gave up and just threw them all in. Some of them tasted pretty good and other burned but the people who were down at the camper liked it. When we started to fry the fish it didn't go any smoother so it ended in us throwing them into to hot oil to fry. Just like the onions some came out nice and others did not. Overall the weekend kinda sucked and we now know not to try tempura batter again. But luckily this up coming weekend I get a break from the camper and will try some other places to fish and keep my sanity.