Counting Fish

This is the body of water that John in 21:1-19 calls the Sea of Tiberius, a late first century name.  Mark and Matthew call it the Sea of Galilee.  Luke more properly calls it the Lake of Galilee.  It isn't really a sea; it's a lovely lake. I swam in it on our pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
The last chapter of John's Gospel takes place there. I want to share with you a funny piece about it that I read 20 years ago in David James Duncan's thought-provoking  novel, The River Why.  In chapter 3a he is talking about how important statistics are to a fishermen:
'The adoration of statistics is a trait so deeply embedded in their nature that even those rarefied anglers the disciples of Jesus couldn't resist backing their yarns with arithmetic: when the resurrected Christ appears on the morning shore of the Sea of Galilee and directs his forlorn and skunked disciples to the famous catch of John 21, we learn that the net contained not "a boatload" of fish, nor "about a hundred and a half," nor "over a gross," but precisely "an hundred and fifty and three."  This is, it seems to me, one of the most remarkable statistics ever computed.  Consider the circumstances: this is after the Crucifixion and the Resurrection; Jesus is standing on the beach newly risen from the dead, and it is only the third time the disciples have seen him since the nightmare of Calvary.  And yet we learn that in the net there were "great fishes" numbering precisely "an hundred and fifty and three."  How was this digit discovered?  Mustn't it have happened thus: upon hauling the net to shore, the disciples squatted down by that immense, writhing fish pile and started tossing them into a second pile, painstakingly counting "one, two, three, four, five, six, seven..." all the way to an hundred and fifty and three, while the newly risen Lord of Creation, the Sustainer of their beings, He who died for them and for Whom they would gladly die, stood waiting, ignored, till the heap of fish was quantified.  Such is the fisherman's compulsion toward rudimentary mathematics!'