Fishing in the Dark

Mike and I decided to try our luck at fishing last night. I can’t tell you the last time the two of us went fishing from a motor boat together, but maybe after you read this you’ll know why it’s been so long.  The problem with going fishing is you have to get everything ready to go fishing and trying to do that at the same time as you’re trying to run a resort and outfitter can be a big challenge.

Mike has so many different tackle boxes and rubbermaids literally filled with lures, hooks, weights, reels, line, etc.  It’s much easier for him to go into the store and grab what he needs than it is to search through all of the different boxes.  Hence the reason for multiple boxes. But of course, not one of those boxes contained the lures he was looking for and last night even our store wasn’t stocked with what he wanted.

Then there’s the matter of finding a rod with a good reel on it. Josh has a tendency of taking our fishing poles and not taking good care of them.  Mike likes to take the reels off of the rods when he portages them. There’s a reel in every box, a box with reels in it but rarely a rod with a reel on it.  He did find two but when I asked him if he had put new line on it a noise that didn’t sound like “Yes, dear.” came out of his mouth.

The depth finder was sitting on the shelf where I placed it last fall and Mike easily found it there. But it wasn’t easy to get it hooked up for some reason and we spent quite a bit of time with Mike on the bottom of the boat trying to get it working while still at the dock.

How about the BWCA permit? Thank goodness for Tony who noticed Mike didn’t grab it and was bringing it out to the dock for us. And a needle nose pliers?  “You mean to tell me you don’t have a needle nose in your boat?” Another inaudible answer out of Mike’s mouth and then a request to Tony, “Could you please go and get me a needle nose from the store and bring it down here?”

“Do you have oars in the boat?”  Mike grabbed some from the shore and thirty minutes after getting into the boat to go we were finally pulling away from the dock. “Yes, we have lights.” And he did have our fishing licenses and a little bit of bug spray left in the bottom of the boat from last year.  We had life vests on and were good to go.

I wish I could say all of the trouble was worth the reward of catching tons of walleye but I can’t.  I can say we couldn’t keep the northern pike off of our lures and the smallmouth bass loved them too.  Not a single walleye was interested in our lures.

But of course, the fishing trip isn’t all about catching fish. It’s about listening to the loons sing, watching a bald eagle soar through the sky and seeing the sun dip beneath the horizon as the sky turns pink.

It would have been much easier to skip the fishing part altogether or have me get my boat ready to go fishing, but that wouldn’t have created a blog worthy story now would it?

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