Fishing Stories and Tall Tales

[Gavin H]

Your welcome OldTimer. Hope you enjoyed it. I shall periodically send more. It's a great thread. Good idea.
Cheers, and have a great day.
Gavin

[Gavin H]

This is an extension of the current post in General Dsicussions called "a few bad apples" and relates to garbage. It is separated as it is a personal story not associated in any way with the Southern Ontario Fisheries Enhancement Initiative I am a part of.

When in my twenties, a few decades ago, I had finished my night shift and as the morning had broken clear, warm and still, I headed off to one of my favorite spots to do a little fly fishing for bluegill and bass. Best access to the river was achieved by parking on the shoulder of a country road and following a short trail on un-posted private property. I had a pleasant morning wading the cool waters, and the fish cooperated nicely. I had the place to myself.
Towards noon, as I worked my way back to where I started, I heard loud voices, large splashes, and foul language and soon saw the source.
Three males, in their late teens, had descended on the river. Their rods and tackle where unused sitting on the edge of the trail and they where entertaining themselves by hurling large rocks and boulders at the water in an effort to splash each other. It was obvious that they had also eaten lunch based on the trash that lay scattered about that had not been there when I arrived.
Upon seeing me wading towards them they stopped their antics and, laughing and joking, headed off to their car leaving a hell of a mess behind.
I hustled up the trail intent on saying something but didn't get the chance as they pulled around my truck and headed on their way in a blue Mustang. But it was at this point they added the straw that broke the camels back, as it were. The driver had rolled down his window and in plain view casually tossed one of those ridiculous Big Gulp containers onto the side of the road.
I went to my truck, quickly tossed my waders and gear in the back and then grabbed the big plastic cup. Then, without any clear plan in mind, I followed suit in my beefed up 69 Chevy. My mood hovered somewhere between fury and disgust and though I didn't know what I was going to do, I was going to do something. I followed behind them at a distance for quite a while when they suddenly pulled up in front of a takeout pizza joint at a little strip mall. I pulled up right beside and quickly hopped out with the cup they had tossed in my hand.
The three guys where still in the car and where listening to music, the windows down, and seemed oblivious to my presence.
Then they looked at me with puzzled expressions as I placed the cup on the hood of their car.
There was a few seconds pause while nobody moved, then, quick as a flash, I slammed my fist down on that cup with all I had, shattering the cup and seriously denting the hood.
They never said a word. Never moved. Just stared for a second or two with huge bulging eyes.
I flicked the remains of the cup towards the windshield, casually sauntered back to my truck and quietly drove away feeling both guilty and wired at the same time.

I do not condone my behaviour, but I hope they got the point.

I have rarely repeated this story. I am not proud. But I can tell you that the fishing spot I described has been posted for a very long time.

Gavin

[Gavin H]

Well Excuuuse Me!


Cal Ripken Jr. was a great baseball player who played a record breaking 2130 consecutive games. Through illness, injury, aches and pains he played game after game and when asked about it he simply replied, “I grew comfortable being uncomfortable”. I love that line. Simple, clear, concise and it also sums up the experience of camping.

First of all, what is camping? Real camping does not involve TV. If you are camping with a television you really aren’t camping. Sitting in a motor-home the size of a train locomotive with a TV, DVD, toilet, shower and air conditioning does not constitute camping. If your butt is located anywhere but on a log, rock or the cold hard ground, you are not camping. The only two modern conveniences you should have are a toothbrush (used for cleaning grit out of your fishing reel) and a can-opener that cost .29 cents and is so useless it would be easier and faster to gnaw the lid off. Also, you and all your possessions should smell like smoke mixed with OFF. That is the essence of camping.

One of the things that makes camping, lets call it memorable, is the sleeping bag. In the olden days, sleeping bags were made from some form of ugly plaid fabric stuffed with wool and weighed about as much as a full grown sheep. They also provided just the right amount of Cal Ripken comfort. On warm nights you could unzip it and lay exposed to the night air to prevent yourself from baking like a foil wrapped potato and on cold nights it would provide protection from freezing to death by setting it on fire. Luckily, using modern, high tech materials, current styles of sleeping bags offer the same protection but are considerably lighter costing only slightly more than the equivalent weight of the bag in hundred dollar bills. One day I’m sure scientists will develop a sleeping bag that is just right, not too hot, not too cold, but by then I will have had all my blood sucked out by mosquitoes while lying on my unzipped sleeping bag.

Luckily one thing that scientists have improved on is the tent. The original tents were made of canvas and though sturdy, they had a built in feature that made them collapse at the worst possible moment such as in the middle of a thunderous rainstorm or at the exact second someone whispered “ssshhhh, was that a bear?” They also weighed more than the combined weight of the people sleeping inside it and required 3 sets of hands to assemble. The next invention in tents was the Orange rip-stop nylon tent. Inexpensive, lightweight, reflective and kept out the rain as long as you didn’t touch the sides of the tent. If it started to rain everyone would squish into the middle to prevent touching the sides or else drip, drip drip. One of the good things about developing a leak was that you could see who had the most absorbent sleeping bag.
Today, modern tents are relatively simple to set up, are wind and waterproof and are so terrifyingly ugly that they scare away bears.

But the meat and potatoes of the camping experience comes from being outdoors and cooking over a campfire. There is nothing more pleasurable than sitting on a log next to your morning campfire. The heat of the burning wood chases away the night chills and aches from sleeping on the cold ground as you listen to the morning bird chorus and the mournful cry of a loon out on the still reflective water of the lake. You feel peaceful and at one with nature knowing that you have survived another night in the wilderness. The smell of the coffee perking awakens your senses as you stir your pot of beans. Life is as it should be. And this brings me to the main point of today’s article. There is a product out there that threatens the heart of, the essence as it were, of camping. This product is called Beano. It is a liquid food additive that comes in a little bottle. All you do is add a couple of drops to your meal and “presto” no gas. Now I ask you this, what would camping be without personal body emissions? It’s not the thought that you didn’t get eaten by a bear that gives you the sense of personal survival, its surviving the methane. Imagine what your first camping trip would have been like with your friends or fellow cub scouts without the reverberant trumpeting followed by incessant giggling and the traumatized adults shouting “WILL YOU SHUT UP”. Boring that’s what. And you don’t even have to say “excuse me”. Like the old saying goes “If a bear farts in the woods, does anyone hear?” Who cares. Its one of life’s great pleasures.

I’ll end by describing one of my greatest camping moments. I used to camp with my best friend Jon on a regular basis. The only problem was that at the mere mention of going camping this particular friend developed instant gas. After one or two meals of campfire food it was almost unbearable. And what made this unfair was that though I would get gas, there was no odor (yes that’s what I’m saying, mine doesn’t stink). It was a one sided misery. Eventually I had had enough. I acquired a vial of ammonia sulfide, a product that makes a skunk smell like Channel Number Five. I snuck out of the tent at the crack of dawn and used a twist tie to lock the zippers together. Then using the hatchet and a rock I broke the vial close to my friends head. I then dashed away to a safe location. At first nothing happened and my anticipation started to build. Then the quiet of the morning was shattered by the most outrageous bellowing and ranting. Not only was the air foul smelling, but it was blue. The tent was tossing around like it was trying to give birth to a large pachyderm. Throughout I stayed quiet and after a minute or two my friend realized he had been had and his ranting turned to muttering. It was at that moment that the shrill, crazy laugh of the loon could be heard reverberating off the rocks and trees.

And that loon was me. Ban Beano!!

[Thebassmaster]

Funniests tory for me is when my friends rod got pulled into the lake by a carp!