VIDALIA — It may have been a little too hot, and the water may have been a little low, but that didn’t stop Gerald and DeLisa Smith from going fishing.

When the Dart landed on Locust Street in Vidalia, Gerald and DeLisa had just gotten back from a trip to Gerald’s brother’s pier on Lake St. John, and they had a mess of catfish and bream.

“She has been begging me to go and begging me to go, and I’ve been promising to take her, so today we went,” Gerald said.

Fishing has been a life-long hobby for DeLisa.

“My brothers and I used to get on our bicycles and ride across the levee to go fishing,” she said.

“It’s the challenge of taking (the fish) on one-on-one I like,” she said.

For Gerald, though, it’s a chance to relax that draws him to the water.

“It gives you something to do, to get things off your mind and get you out of the house for a while,” he said.

And it doesn’t hurt that you can eat what you catch, either.

The secret to frying catfish is, once you clean them, use a fillet knife to remove the brown film from the meat, Gerald said.

“That old, cruddy, nasty stuff is what makes it taste bad,” he said. “That’s the part that turns black when you fry it, and that’s not meat.”

After that, Gerald said he puts the fillets in some water with baking soda.

“That baking soda takes that muddy river taste out of the meat,” he said. “Once you do that, you won’t eat catfish any other way.”

Because the catch was so successful, Gerald said they weren’t going to fry them up right away after all of the work that would have to go into cleaning them, but that he would probably fry them within a couple of days.

“I won’t wait any longer than that, because I don’t believe in freezing fish,” he said.