Whoever Heard of Catfish in a Swimming Pool?

When I rank the numerous bizarre stories from my childhood, number one on the list is probably the time my dad stocked our swimming pool with catfish.

While I'm tempted to just leave the details story to your imagination, I suppose it's only fair to share it. 

You see, my dad has come up with a number of bad ideas over the years, generally with the goal of either making or saving a few dollars. So when someone told him that he could save money on chlorine and electricity during the wintertime by stocking the swimming pool with catfish, he was open to hearing the details.

The premise was that catfish were bottom feeders and would naturally eat the algae and bacteria that cause unattended pools to turn green. Someone (and perhaps it was a catfish salesman) managed to convince my dad that the upfront costs of buying a bunch of catfish would pay for more than even out from the savings on electricity and chlorine (not to mention the effort of cleaning the pool) in just one winter, and when it was warm enough to swim again, the catfish could easily be scooped out of the clear water and provide a number of tasty meals.

As my dad loves catfish, saving money, and the saving effort, it seemed to him a brilliant plan.

And what could go wrong?

Well, everything.

Catfish might eat bacteria and algae, but they don't eat their own poop, so the pool quickly turned some shade of brownish-green.  The fins cut holes in the pool lining, which meant that not only did my dad waste a whole lot of money on catfish, he had to drop over a thousand dollars for a new pool liner. 

But before we could do that, he had to remove the catfish from the pool.  For some reason, my dad didn't want to chlorinate the pool until the fish were gone.  Maybe he thought it would be a lost cause, as the catfish's natural pollution would undo whatever benefit the chlorine might offer.

More likely, he thought the catfish's ingestion of chlorine would render them inedible and thus destroy the last potential minuscule return on his investment. 

Why he didn't just drain the pool is an open question, but my only guess is that he wanted to catch the fish slowly so as to allow the catfish to reproduce all winter, thus maximizing the proceeds of his investment over time.

But even using this incremental strategy, the whisker-filled bottom feeders proved surprisingly difficult to fish out of the murky water. The catfish remained in the pool long after the experiment had proven itself a complete disaster.

To make matters worse, my dad had his real estate office behind the house, directly beside the pool. On more than one occasion, a client arrived to close on a real estate transaction only to be greeted by the sight of a green swimming pool, and one of my then-skinny brothers casting a fishing line inside of it, apparently in hopes of a small miracle.

If my dad sold any property at all during this period, it was a small miracle in and of itself. 

The pool was eventually drained, and I don't remember whether we ate the catfish immediately or just threw them in the pond that was further behind the house. 

That pond, by the way, was full of brown, murky water, despite the presence of numerous catfish inside it.

Perhaps that should have been a sign.