Friday, September 26, 2008

Cause Essay

There is nothing like the smell of early morning next to a lake. All our gear is packed tightly in the sixteen foot aluminum boat. The 18 horse power motor is running and filling the morning air with exhaust fumes and I am still a little groggy from the lack of sleep the night before. The anticipation of this day made me toss and turn all night, but it’s nothing that a strong cup of instant camp coffee can’t fix. “Five days of fishing and relaxation Sam” “yup” my father law says sitting in his captain’s chair with his hand on the throttle, waiting for me to shove off. I push us out and we begin to move towards the mouth of the canal that drains into the main lake. The sun is just up over the horizon and the yellowish red tint on the water from the sun makes me put on my sunglasses to protect my eyes. As we motor through the narrow canal back and forth avoiding all shallow parts, I can see the lake in the distance for a moment before it is swallowed up by live and dying pine trees. The lily pads have moved closer to the middle of the canal and there seems to be a little more sweat grass near the shore this year, it won’t be long before the moose are in and around the shore indulging themselves on it. Then we round the corner, there it is, the sun gleams off the surface of the lake like crystals in a window just like it does every year, and I can’t help but think of the small mouth bass that were practically jumping in the boat the year before. As we head across the lake to our campsite that can only be reached by boat, I just sit there taken up by all the beauty and hope that this year on our annual fishing trip will be just as action packed as the years before it. Little did I know that the camp fire conversation, the weather, and the fishing would test our patience as well as our own limits like it has so many times in our past trips.

The trip started off like any other trip. Sam and I got to the campsite and started to put the tent, and all the many tarps, when we were done it looked like a giant tarp city. We had a few hours to kill until my Dad and Uncle Tony were going to show up. Tony is not really my uncle but I have known him for as long as I can remember, he is a very big guy, and could provably crush my head in one of his hands, but he is kind of a big teddy bear. My dad is not a small guy either, and on many occasions growing up he has tried to crush my head with one hand just for fun, but I think I could take him now. Sam and I went fishing for a couple of hours, and with no real trophy Bass pulled in the boat we took off to the boat launch to meet the other two tenants of our tent city. Now after we all set up the rest of the camp, we decide to go fishing until it gets dark. Once again we all return with not one trophy bass story, and I started to make dinner. The first night has the tradition to cook four, two inch thick T-bones on an open fire, and usually we eat them with our bare hands, while sitting next to the camp fire, just a little barbaric but it is tradition. I learn a lot about my father just sitting around the campfire, but mostly I hear the same old stories from all three of them every year, like the time Sam lost is wallet for ten years and one of his friends found it inside of a mattress, at the camp they all hung out when he was a teen. Or the time Tony took a row boat to an island off the coast about two miles in some very thick fog just to see some girl, and then rowed back in four foot seas. But mostly the stories I hear from my dad I have never heard before, like stories of him and his brothers, antagonizing the poor old lady down the street from where they lived, or the stories of the things his father made him do when he got in trouble, like the time he skipped school, and his father made him pull a one ton bolder out of their lawn, and by the time he was done he had all the boys in the neighborhood helping him. Then there are a lot of personal trials and tribulations he has gone through almost the same way I went through them, so it’s kind of strange hearing the same things my father did I have done also, I guess the apple really doesn’t fall far from the tree.

We all get up every morning before the sun, talking about how all this fresh air made us all sleep like babies, and we all haven’t slept like that since the last time we were camping, its really the same old thing every year. We all hop in our boats and take off with big dreams of catching the first fish because first fish of the day gets a dollar from everyone. I don’t want to brag or anything but I usually catch the first one. We took off that morning knowing that we had a chance of a thunder storm and rain and heavy winds, but we went across the lake any ways. We have been caught on the lake when a storm comes up and we have had to beach the boats to keep from being hit by lighting, so this little warning was not going to stop us. Around 9:00 am we snuck into a cove because the wind was getting to strong and we could not keep the boat in one place for very long. Looking like it was starting to get worse we started to go back across the lake back to camp, but once we got out of the cove and around the little island that was sheltering us from the wind we knew we were in for a ride. Every wave was about four feet high and every time we went over one the next one was there to dump 10 gallons of water in the boat. Sam did a good job ridding the waves but I was sitting up front trying to hold down the front with my weight, and every wave put me almost ten feet in the air, and then we would take a nose dive. About half way across and thirty minutes later Sam told me to grab the life vest from the cubby because he was starting to get nervous, so of course now I started to get nervous. After every wave I would brace myself for the next one and wait for the big one to flip us over but we made and I lived to fish another day

We fish every hole in that lake and it takes all day, except for the hour we all return to camp to eat and re-charged the thermos with the strongest coffee known to man. We catch a lot of fish but nothing like the year before, we had to practically bait our hooks behind trees before getting in the boats, it was crazy. There was one day that Sam and I caught 71 small mouth bass in a day, I was some tired when we returned to camp. This year we were not so lucky but on the day before we left I caught the big one. Sam and I returned to a hole we had been fishing the day before but were not catching anything, it was on the way to one of our other fishing spots. I had just put new line on my Abu Garcia bait caster, and I had not yet fine tuned the Fourteen pound test line, so the first cast was a very conservative, short, not well aimed cast, and of course like every other time I put new line on, the first cast got all snarled up around the spool. As I pulled line out to fix the snarl, I noticed my line moving where it had landed, and it was moving towards us faster than the boat was floating, so I quickly pulled line and when I started to reel what I pulled out back in, my line started to move even faster in the opposite direction I was moving. I waited until just before all the slack was taken up and I gave it a good tug, and set the hook, and then I felt the power of this fish. It pulled line out of my reel like the drag was not even there, and I could hear it trying hard to slow this fish down. I let the fish take what it wanted and then it was my turn, and as I started reeling the line in, the fish started swimming towards the boat, I reeled faster and faster, and then the fish took a dive, I pulled up on the pole and the fish started coming to the surface. Running out of water to swim in, the fish still tried to swim, it must have jumped three feet in the air, and I finally got to see what I was fighting with. It hit the water and started to dive again and the entire battle began again. After about twenty minutes the fish tried to go to the bottom one last time, and then gave up and floated to the top. I pulled my five and half pound twenty one inch small mouth into the boat and I had my father in law snap a few pictures, gave it a big old kiss and threw it back in. So I have a couple of picture and a broken $120 reel, the fish burned my drag out of my reel.

When I return home from our fishing trips I am always more exhausted then when I left. I always come home with great fishing stories, some true and maybe some just stretched a little. There are always scars from the trip like broken flashlights, ripped tarps from 40mph winds and broken tent poles to match, nothing a little duct tape won’t fix. Engine problems that turn out to be just loose gas lines, dirty carbs, bad plugs and flooded engines that you should always let vent out before you start the motor, at least if you want to save you fire extinguisher for a much bigger fire. Falling out of the boat, loosing fishing poles, hitting rocks, getting stuck in trees, getting stuck on rocks, hooking my father law, my father in law hooking me, and losing two hundred bucks worth of lures and gear. Every year we say “same time same place next year?” and we go our separate ways back to the busy world where we all came from. Even though we may not have caught a lot of fish, and the trip in the long run cost us more than we would have made if we stayed at work, we all still come back to our same old fishing hole each year and enjoy each othesr company, and just relax, because you know what they say “a bad day of fishing is still better then a good day at work.”

2 comments:

johngoldfine said...

You've built the whole thing very nicely--the outline of where we're going is clear and you string it with all sorts of stories and incidents (did you really burn the drag out of a reel???).

I guess my only question would be the last sentence of graf 1--I see your patience tested in graf 4, your limits in graf 3, but graf 2?

Minor point, though. Glad to take it.

Swade said...

I have had the drag for about 6 years and after five years of abuse and catching fish about that size it finaly broke. The magnetic drag for casting broke. Graf 2 was about campfire conversation and fellowship of the four of us