Bad luck and good ideas
Hey folks. How goes it? Before I get going too far, I got to explain. I’m comin’ off the worst spell of bad luck I ever had. Even when my friend Diane divorced me I didn’t feel so poorly.
Starts out this girl needs a place to hang her hat. Sure, I’m easy. Too bad she wipes out my debit card. Well, I’m waiting for paperwork to have her arrested but it’s not helping my wallet much, is it?
Next: fishing. I snapped three nice lines on three fish. Oh well. Tradition has it Father’s Day is my first day of fishing season. I weren’t getting a thing, so I came home. And my pal Randy started nailing the bastards. The rest of the week only got worse.
Like I say, there’s really nothing to write about ’cause there weren’t no fish caught. I should have gone up and joined Randy on Sebago. Believe it or not, he left a two-foot pike in my freezer. Don’t know how legal it is or nothin’ else about it, for that matter. But if any Game Warden wants to come over — well, feel free. I don’t even know how to cook it or nothing. Says he got it off a live slug. Now, I don’t know if’n that’s legal either. I do happen to know that slugs got to be the ugliest animal on this planet. Guess they look great to fish, though. Funny how one thing is so tasty to one species and ugly to another.
Did I ever mention how in India they hold cremation on the river bank in order to feed the fish?
To cap my bad luck run, I lost my whole column, so I’m more or less kind of ad-libbing this and I’m real short on time. Please bear with me, okey-dokey? All true, though.
Randy claims he’s averaging four or five bass a day. But he don’t care for them ’nough to scale ’em or clean ’em. It does take some work to dress a largemouth bass, you know. He’s really hoping to get one of them pretty lake trout. I’m fixing to go up next weekend and show him how to do it. Now, if’n all I get is bass, I will dress ’em.
I got another plan, also. Instead of just lookin’ at a bobber, I’m gonna stay busy. I’m gonna tie a magnet to rope and sort of drag the bottom. At worse this will accomplish a couple of things. I will recover a lot of lost fishing gear. And it will help clean up the ocean, right? Boy, when I think up an idea I don’t fuck around, do I? Never know — I may even find valuables. Boy, I could be the talk of the town!
Did you realize that down by the trestle was really at one time a boat-building yard? As I think of it, I wish it still was. Oh, what I’d give to walk down by Tukey’s Bridge and watch ’em hammerin’ away, puttin’ together keels and masts and, you know, the whole shebang.
Sometimes I think I should have been born a hundred years ago. Fishing in public has not seen many changes. Oh, commercial fishing has changed a lot, but not pleasure fishing. You could go down the pier right now and you would see the exact same scene as you would hundreds of years ago. And I love it.
Now I’m going to close this piece on somethin’ called the Wilhelm Gustloff. Ain’t heard of it, have you? Biggest disaster in ocean history. It was Germans trying to escape Russian invaders. Torpedos blew their ship into the next century. They were mad at Germany, you see. Killed 9,000 Germans. Them darn torpedoes.
