A Three Hour Tour

This friend of mine, a particularly good one, asked me and a few of his coworkers to go on a chartered fishing trip last Friday. It was supposed to be five hours on Lake Erie, but we didn’t know if we were going to head out in the first place as the captain wasn’t sure it was safe. Finally, he gave it a “go” and we headed out onto choppy waters.

When we finally reached “the right spot,” we started fishing. For the life of me I don’t know how you find a “spot” in the middle of Lake Erie. All the “spots” seem identical to me. But what do I know? I’m a land lubber. And how. But we fished that “spot” with swells of water making their way higher and higher over the side of the boat. And I have to confess that baiting my hook while being tossed in the air was challenging. I have a few holes in the epidermis of my phalanges to prove it. You had to grab a minnow by the head so you could spear it with the hook. I considered holding it between my teeth while hooking it, but the guys might have thought I was showing off. Can’t have that. But, still, minnow eyeballs and brains were flying everywhere.

It was truly disgusting, yes, but manly men don’t squawk at such things.

The boat heaved us higher and higher. Water sprayed in our faces, as if someone was on the side of the boat squirting us with a water hose. Perhaps it was the fish. They certainly weren’t busy getting caught. But I was loving every minute of it, just happy that someone invited me to the “spot.”

Did I mention I caught a fish?

It was a little silver thing. About an inch and a half long. It gleamed at me balefully, clearly upset with me for having interrupted morning breakfast. We tossed it back, to the delight of some seagulls, and I continued feeding minnows to fish I’d never even get to see. They carefully slipped the bait off the hooks and looked up from the depths, laughing at the goofy looking guy being tossed around on the boat.

A few of the other guys caught a decent sized fish or two, but the weather started getting dark and our captain said grimly, “We’d better head back in.” I looked at him and, I have to say, he looked a little nervous to me. Which made me a little nervous. Our brave and sure captain had been doing this for twenty five years. He’s not supposed to get nervous. But his first mate, a mighty sailing man, quickly reeled in the rods and we began shoving our way through waves that were now, according to the captain, “six footers.”

Six footers?

Water crashed over the boat, and I’d say that approximately 92.3 percent of it went down my shirt and shorts, to pool icily in my skivvies. (That’s sailor talk for undies.)  A tarp was pulled over us, which helped, and we made it back to shore, where things were much more calm. Nice even. Our five hour tour had been cut to three, but it was a blast. And we had a little time to fish from the docks. Now, that was the “spot.”

Ironic ending: For lunch we had all you can eat fish at a restaurant. It wasn’t fresh, but hey. I was glad to make it to shore in one piece.



Matthew 4:19
Peace to you, land lubbers.


© LW Publishing 2010

Fish Stories

When I was really young, maybe 5 or 6 years old, I went fishing with my dad and my brothers and some of my dad’s friends. This was a big deal because they were all heap big fisherman. I can still picture the area we were fishing in my head, but I don’t know where it was. My dad set a rod for me and put it in the water with all the others.

And I waited. That's what fishing is you know. It's the art of waiting.

I played in the trees. I played with bugs. Occasionally I’d go to take my line out of the water and my dad would tell me to leave it alone or I wouldn’t catch anything, pulling the line in and out. Eventually I grew tired of messing with it and went to play in the twilight. As the sun went down, a different set of bugs came out that kept my attention for a while. But when it was good and dark, the grown ups decided it was time to go. So I went to reel in my line, but it didn’t reel in very easy. It seemed to be stuck on something.

It was stuck on a pike fish. It was a big one.

Someone yelled, “Dave’s got a fish!” Dad helped me reel it in, and my parents have a picture somewhere of me and my sister and one of my brothers holding this fish up – if they find it I’ll post it – but that fish was about as tall as I was.

It was a great thing, but let me just say, it sets up some rather high expectations. My life in fishing has been all downhill from there. Nowadays, fish just laugh at me as I drag bait right across their faces.

But then there’s my daughter. She is the proverbial middle child and she is a born fisher-person. Whatever little talent or luck or whatever it was that was displayed that day in my childhood has blossomed in her, and she is not timid about it. She baits the hooks. She takes the fish on and off. She finds a way. She doesn’t let the gooey stuff bother her. And she will fish all day if we let her.

We have been going to a Jellystone campground for years now, and we always have to buy her bait and bring the rods so she can spend hour after hour fishing. She catches blue gill after blue gill, looks at them in a bucket for a few hours, then pours them back in the water for next time. So it was no surprise when she came back to the cabin this last time saying, “Dad! I caught a fish!” Cool. Another fish. I looked in the bucket.

It was a large mouth bass. 13 or 14 inches? Pretty long. She caught it all by herself. Completely. 8 years old. You’ve got to love it.

And we did. For dinner.





Peace to you.


© LW Publishing 2010