Karl Etters

Democrat staff writer

What Bo and Terry Fountain saw Thursday morning is more common for a Southern dinner menu than a weather forecast.

As the husband and wife landlords held a meeting seated around a picnic table with their tenants of Fountain Plaza, a small complex on Apalachee Parkway, a loud sound gave them a jolt.

“We heard a kapow,” Bo Fountain said. “It sounded like a gunshot. Then a catfish landed on the ground.”

The fish, a prominent bottom feeder in Southeastern lakes and rivers and the favorite punching bag for snobby foodies, hit a metal roof then thudded to the ground.

Its side was gashed open. Terry Fountain estimated it may have come from a flock of circling birds he’d seen overhead moments before the aquatic creature plummeted to the earth.

The nearest lakes are Lake Piney Z and Upper Lake Lafayette, just over a mile to the north.

They’d just moved the picnic table into the shade. Two feet in one direction and the catfish would have joined their meeting.

“If it had hit the table instead of the ground,” Terry Fountain said, “I would have had a heart attack.”

After the meeting, the couple grabbed the fish, put it in the back of their Ford Ranger and took off for their farm in Cairo, Georgia.

"I thought it was a flying fish,” Bo Fountain joked.

Contact Karl Etters at ketters@tallahassee.com or @KarlEtters on Twitter.