I don't know if the expression, blind hog finds an acorn, is uniquely Southern or not. It is used often below the Mason-Dixon, when fishing, to express disdain at the unlikely good fortune of some other angler.
     The blind hog knows no season. One early spring morning I was fishing for pompano on the rocks of Bob Sikes Cut. I had labored hard to get sand fleas; I had a new chrome-headed Nylure with a finely sharpened hook tied directly to gossamer eight-pound test line, the better to fool the wily, sharp-eyed predator.
     A tourist angler chugs up to the rock next to me: battered fresh-water rod and reel, twenty-pound-test rope tied to a steel leader that snapped to a rusted jig. And on the jig, for lack of a proper sand flea, he had impaled the leg off an unfortunate ghost crab. It was all I could do to not laugh out loud. I was still smirking and his grotesque offering had barely hit the water when the six-pound pampano grabbed it. Blind hog/acorn.
     The blind hog can teach lessons. Recently my brother drove all the way from Louisiana to fish with me for cold-water reds on top-water lures. His knot breaks on the first big redfish he has on; he loses the second when his drag screws up because of sand in the reel. His reel now damaged, he has to tie on a giant lure just to be able to cast a pitiful short distance. So he splashes the big plug about ten feet from the boat and the biggest redfish of the day inhaled it. He almost gets it to the boat when his rod breaks.

He landed the fish (see last month's "Redfish University") but there were no extra rods in the boat. He kept casting the rest of the trip with half a rod and a grit-filled reel. Never caught anything else but never stopped. Blind hog knows you got to root.
     Now, it is true that even skillful anglers will blind hog a fish now and again. I hooked my first tarpon when I quit reeling in my grub to watch another person catch a trout, which is what we were fishing for. The biggest redfish I ever caught was in the winter at Sikes Cut; I had lost so many rigs I was down to my last sinker and when that got hung up I said some bad words, set the rod down none too gently and went for a beer. When I got back to the rod, the thirty-seven pounder was swimming around with my hook in his mouth. Naturally I would have told a much different story back at the bar if it were not for all the eye witnesses yelling,"Root!Root! "
     Blind hogs can be of either sex and some of them are very attractive. My lovely wife and I were trolling spoons in a glacier-fed lake in Alaska in search of rainbow trout over two feet long. Her rod bends, guide cuts the motor, she jerks the rod wildly several times and says, "I'm hung up on a rock, again." And, indeed, she had been in the rocks most of the day, despite my continuous coaching.
     The guide grabs the line and jerks to break it. Something jerks back. Eventually she reels in a thirty-two-inch monster rainbow. Of course that was bigger than any I caught, as she will gladly tell anyone who admires the picture. I'm not the only one who has troubles like that with his wife. I took Adam and Clair Hartmann of Jacksonville fishing during a recent cold spell. We were fishing Top Dogs at the mouth of Whiskey George Creek for reds and trout feeding on feeding mullet. We put Clair in the &back of the boat but that didn't stop her from nailing the big fish of the day.
      " "She always does that to me," " Adam noted. " "So does mine,"" I empathized. ""I wonder why we keep them?"" ""Because,""I reminded him, ""we're just blind hogs that found the acorn of love.""
     

 
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