I Clamped at the Eelpout Festival

I debated whether to reveal this immediately after the festival, but now I feel I must come clean, especially after being assigned to the CNR legal team.

Saturday night I was talking with a guy at Camp Never Rest who just happened to have a depth finder attached to his zipper (the zipper on his jacket - just to clarify). A lime green one. I asked him if he had ever heard of the I.B.O.T.s, the guys who caught tons of big crappies out of Upper Red Lake during the great Crappie Gold rush of the 1990's and early 2000's.

He said he hadn't so I proceeded to tell him about the clamping initiation, "You take one of those depth finders and clamp it on to the little strip of meat that separates your two nostrils." I barely had finished telling him about it and he said, "I can do that." and clamped that green depth finder on to his nose. I looked on in horror. Then I said, "And you have to keep it on there for 10 seconds." Tears ran down his eyes but he kept it there for the full 10 seconds.

Now I have to admit that I was always curious about what it took to be an I.B.O.T. I was pretty sure one of the main ingredients was alcohol - and it just so happened I had plenty of that. So I thought, "What the hell, give me that thing." Now you would never know this, but that little strip of meat between your nostrils actually has more than one position where you could clamp a chunk of lime green lead with an alligator like pinching profile. (By the way, I think that thing, that part of the nose, is called the columella.) I started at the bottom of the columella and... "Jiminy Fawkin' Christmas!" that hurts like a son-of-a-bitch. So I moved it up closer to the top of the columella, and that hurt like a son-of-a-bitch too, but I didn't really have any place left to go if I was going to get this out of my system. I let it clamp down hard.

Next the counting began... one (wait 10 seconds), two (wait another 10 seconds)... "Faw-kinn-ae do we need a new time keeper?"

After what seemed like a week at the dentist, I heard someone say "TEN". Faw-kinn-ae. I checked for blood but there was none.

My new clamping buddy and I looked like we had been peeling onions and squirting lemon juice in our eyes... but Faw-kinn-ae we did it! We clamped at the Eelpout Festival.

Thanks Camp Never Rest.