I’ve been talking to one of my coworkers about going fishing for a while now. He’s been talking a lot about this pond near his home that is almost literally crawling with bass. And not just any bass, either. Big bass. Bass so big that grown men are intimidated by them. Or so I was told. So yesterday I finally decided to go to this pond and see for myself.
We pulled up to the fishing hole to find that during the night, some evildoer had stolen the pond and replaced it with a filthy, smelly, muddy puddle with an equally muddy and smelly island in the middle. Turns out that some construction workers had driven a backhoe up to the culvert where the water ran out of the pond and cleared out the debris that had allowed the pond to form. Props to the helpful construction workers who singlehandedly destroyed a thriving aquatic ecosystem to say nothing of my afternoon.
So we decided that since we were already there, and there was still some water, we would go fishing anyway. We blew up the rafts and threw them into the puddle and shoved off to begin our fishing adventure. However, as we tried to paddle, we began to realize that the water was so thick with weeds, it was like trying to paddle a raft across your living room carpet. Less effective. As we examined our plight, we looked across the island and realized that the other side of the puddle was actually fairly weed free and somewhat deeper and we began to muscle our raft across the weeds in that direction. Much to our dismay, however, we soon found that the island actually cut off any access to the other side of the puddle via water (or weed as the case may be.)
We boldly decided to take the overland route, and my boat buddy, another coworker of mine, jumped out of the raft onto the deceptively solid-looking shore of the island, immediately sinking up to his knees in the reeking mud, which released a foul rotten-egg odor as he broke through it. I’m not sure if the sick feeling that came over me at this point was because of the horrible odor or the realization that I was spending my afternoon in a filthy stinking swamp. In any case, my boat buddy managed to extricate himself from the slimy mud and clamber back into the relatively safe confines of our raft. Needless to say, we wisely decided to stay on our weedy side. My other coworker who had been so enthused about this fishing hole dragged his raft over the mud to the other side. He told me afterward that the smell was so bad, he actually threw up. That’s dedication.
Back in my raft, we started to fish, hoping to salvage some part of an increasingly doomed expedition. I was so focused on catching as many weeds as possible that I failed to note the quickly darkening skies above us until some raindrops hit me. I looked up in time to see a furious downpour sweep across our little muddy puddle, drenching us in our small unprotected rafts. The rain was cold, and adding insult to injury, it rinsed a lot of mud off of my boat buddy into the bottom of our raft, where it ran to my end, allowing me to partake in the fun.
At this point, we had finally had enough. After paddling our raft around the weeds for a little bit longer, we pulled it out of the lake and waited by the cars for our fellow fishermen. We piled the muddy, smelly rafts into my nice, relatively clean car and went home.
Jack Handy once said “If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let ‘em go, because man, they’re gone.” I think that this is true. To this useful advice I add my own: “If you’re going fishing and you show up and the lake’s disappeared, just go home.” Trust me.