The Bud Light Blob

“There are no salmon. This is the worst fishing we have had in twenty-eight years.”

When you travel thousands of miles via plane, rental car, bus, train, smaller plane, Uber, foot, cab, ferry, and finally, tiny float plane, to get to a remote five-star floating Alaskan fishing lodge, there are a lot of things you want to hear when you step out of the float plane onto the dock. That is not one of them.

We were fortunate enough to have been guests at this same great place, the Sea Otter Sound Lodge, four years ago, and apparently, we became spoiled then, fishing-wise. Four years ago, we almost couldn’t keep the salmon out of the boat. And since they are the premier Alaskan fish, we spent almost all our time targeting the salmon, never fishing very seriously for any other species.

That being said, let’s not forget my masterful helmsmanship on the last trip, the day I guided my wife to her monster seventeen-pound halibut. Halibut boat captaining requires that you are able to keep your boat positioned over the same spot on the ocean floor, some two to four hundred feet below.

I was so skillful at this maneuver, my wife could be heard for miles singing my praises with encouraging phrases like, “What the hell are you doing?” and, “Why are we spinning like a drunken ballerina?” She could be heard for miles across the ocean not because sound carries well across water, but because we traveled for miles across the ocean as I fearlessly attempted to keep us in one place.

I tried to explain to her about tidal friction, wave current, ballast displacement, navigational knots, etc. – all the nautical factors that I had to take into account as captain – but I don’t think she understood it all. At one point, she even grabbed the VHS radio mic off my bulkhead helm near the port aft, and called the lodge, saying something I didn’t quite catch about “another boat driver.” I assume she was letting them know that the other guests couldn’t compare to me. I heard Tim, the owner of the lodge, say something about sympathizing with her concerns, but the conversation was interrupted when the fishing line started zinging off her reel.

I had maneuvered the boat directly over the top of the waiting beast, and my wife was in for the fight of her life. Two and a half minutes later, we hauled our catch over the side of the boat (known as the stern whale), after I had harpooned and gaffed it extensively, because that’s what you do with the big game.

Fortunately, I had not forgotten any of those halibut boat captaining skills, because we needed them this past week.

As Tim explained to us upon our arrival, the entire state of Alaska is currently being visited by the least amount of salmon they have seen since the Paleozoic era. Apparently, in 2014, there was a situation in the Pacific Ocean that somehow caused this issue.

This all had something to do with El Nino, which is Alaskan Inuit for “no salmon.” El Nino is an ocean current, or a storm, or a small baby whale. Details are sketchy. What they do know for sure is that a series of “perfect storm” events lined up to create what scientists have very scientifically named, “The Blob.”   

The Blob is a vast pocket of warm water, floating in the cold water. It formed in 2014 as a small blob, and then El Nino combined forces with other unnamed forces and transformed the baby blob into a massive blob, about one thousand square miles in size on the surface, and a significant number of fathoms deep. (Unfortunately, no one knows how much a fathom is, so we’ll never really know how deep it goes.)

The Blob prevented the salmon that would normally be in the waters of Alaska now from getting there on time. Think of The Blob as a giant oceanic TSA security station, or the DMV of the deep.

As he explained this to the group, I shrunk silently to the back of the room, hoping not to draw attention to myself. I crossed my fingers and prayed Tim and his wife Murtie would not make the connection, but it was obvious to me. We were there, fishing in the Alaskan Pacific in 2014.

Between the eight of us, we consumed an inordinate amount of beer over the five-day fishing trip. Since we were on the boats all day, the vast majority of that beer was recycled directly into the ocean.

Could we have been responsible for the blob? Well, I think it’s a real possibility. I’m no oceanographer, but I can tell you I’m probably responsible for at least two to three hundred square miles of ocean being converted to 98.6 degrees..

Further fueling my suspicions of culpability is the fact that the blob is gone now. It slowly dissipated over the last four years. And where were we the last four years? Not peeing in the Alaskan ocean, that’s where. Coincidence? You be the judge.

Sorry about that, Alaska. We toned it down on the beer this time, so fingers crossed for four years from now. I’m looking forward to getting home and grilling up our halibut from this trip. I think I have enough for a pretty decent appetizer.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2018 Marc Schmatjen

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I'm a Little Crabby

My extended family and I were in the Outer Banks last week on vacation. In case you are unaware, the Outer Banks, or OBX, as the locals call it, is basically a sandbar in the Atlantic Ocean just off of North Carolina. It runs half the length of the NC coastline and varies in width between a staggering five neighborhood blocks wide and just wide enough for one bicycle and one jogger to pass each other if the jogger turns sideways.

The first people to visit the OBX were Native Americans in the early 1500s. They took one look at the North Carolina Highway Department’s ridiculous layout of having the only two bridges from the mainland connect smack in the middle of the two hundred-mile-long stretch, and said, “Forget this mess. Traffic is going to be a nightmare.”

They were right.

The next group of people to visit the OBX were the Europeans, who arrived in the late 1500s and stayed, even though the prices for crab cakes and hand-churned ice cream bordered on gouging. A group from the Netherlands built the first three-story home on the beach, complete with ten bedrooms, eight and a half baths, a pool, a hot tub, and a gourmet kitchen with two dishwashers. The Germans immediately opened a real estate office specializing in vacation rentals and offered to represent them. A day later, an English immigrant sold them the first hurricane insurance policy in America’s history. Within a week they had one hundred percent occupancy from a vacationing Virginia dentist and his extended family, and the OBX was born.

I’m sure a lot of notable people have vacationed in the OBX over the years, but certainly it’s most famous visitors were Orville and Wilbur Wright. They were on more of a working vacation, busy running up and down sand dunes dressed in three-piece suits and snappy patent leather shoes. Sure, they managed the first powered, controlled flights in history, but unfortunately for aviation, they chose a field in Kitty Hawk. Amazingly, they were only three or four blocks from the town of Kill Devil Hills! Think of how much cooler the history books would sound. I’m not sure what they were thinking. At least they didn’t choose the town of Duck. (Yes, Duck, NC. No, I’m not making that up.)

For those of us less visionary visitors who go to the OBX for non-working vacations, we are forced to choose a side each day. There are two sides to the OBX – the ocean side and the sound side.

The ocean side offers endless wonderful beaches with one main activity – playing in the waves. The sound side offers jet skiing, wind surfing, paddle boarding, boating, fishing, and my personal favorite, chicken neckin’.

No, that’s not what it means.

Chicken neckin’ is marketed by the OBX board of tourism as a fun and surprisingly effective way to catch the delicious Carolina blue crab. All you need is a string, a chicken’s neck, and a public dock on the water. You simply drop the chicken neck down to the bottom on a string, the blue crab grabs on for a tasty meal, and you pull him right out of the water. What could be simpler or more fun for the whole family?

Where do I find a chicken’s neck that I do not have to separate from the chicken myself?, you might ask. Simple. Every tackle shop in the OBX has a freezer full of them in the back.

Do I need to buy an expensive fishing license to catch crabs in the state of North Carolina?

Of course not. Not to chicken neck. It’s free!

What is the limit?

Each visitor to our beautiful state can catch and keep fifty blue crabs per day! Fifty! Per day! That’s enough to feed an entire three-story, ten-bedroom vacation rental every night.

I love crab, and this sounds like my kind of family fun, OBX. Let’s do this!

Off to the tackle shop I went to get my family outfitted for this unique, exciting, and free brand of entertainment. In the back of the shop I found the freezer full of chicken necks, right next to the wall of chicken neckin’ gear.

Here’s the special chicken neckin’ string with a weight and a cool chicken neck attaching wire. That’s handy. Ooh, look! Nets that collapse on the bottom and can catch lots of crabs at once instead of just one at a time. And the great state of North Carolina says I can use five collapsible crab traps without needing a fishing license. Sweet!

And don’t forget your long-handled net to make sure you don’t lose the crabs at the surface when you’re pulling them up hand over fist.

And you’ll need one of these special chicken neckin’ five-gallon buckets to hold the hundreds of crabs you and your family will catch.

We also sell special crab claw-proof rope for those collapsible net traps. You don’t want to be hauling up a mess of blue crab only to lose them because you were using the wrong rope!

And we also sell pliers, because it never hurts to have pliers when you’re fishing.

Oh, and of course, the chicken necks.

That will be seventy-five dollars, sir.

Wow! This “free” form of wholesome outdoor family entertainment is expensive. But let’s keep our eye on the prize. That’s a small price to pay for a week of all the crab we can eat. We’re going to be money ahead in no time. Someone start melting the butter. It’s chicken neckin’ time!

We loaded up the rented minivan with eager chicken neckers, and off we went to the public docks at the old city park – “the best place in the OBX to catch blue crab,” as advertised by every tackle shop and board of tourism flyer on the two hundred-mile stretch of sunbaked sand.  

We arrived on the dock, greeted by a mob of other tourists, all sporting their shiny new buckets and collapsible nets with special crab claw-proof ropes.

“Any luck?” we ask hopefully.

“Not yet,” they reply, returning our hopeful smiles, only with a slight sadness behind their eyes.

We find an open section of dock and get right to our wholesome family fun. After an hour or so of not catching a single blue crab, I start to look around. Hmm… there’s not one scratched-up bucket or weathered-looking long-handled net out here. I get the feeling the local chicken neckers aren’t here with us at “the best place in the OBX to catch blue crab.”  

“Let’s try again early tomorrow morning,” I told the kids, “before everyone else is here.”

That might be a good plan at another vacation destination, but not so much for us in the OBX. The early bird may get the worm, but the early OBX chicken neckin’ tourist gets exactly one blue crab that is too small to keep.

Wash, rinse, repeat for the next week, trying desperately to get your money’s worth out of your heap of surprisingly ineffective chicken neckin’ gear, and do you know what you end up with?

One stinkin’ crab, that’s what. One stinkin’ blue crab that may or may not have just barely made the five-inch size limit, but we were damn-sure keeping.

He was delicious. We split him between all the kids that stuck with the chicken neckin’ effort over the week. We each had one bite about the size of a thumbnail.

We did end up having some good family time together during this wholesome and fun family activity, but I must say, if you thought the OBX was price gouging on shrimp scampi, wait until you spend twelve hundred dollars a pound for crab.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen

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Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

These Guys Sound Fishy

A long time ago, in another life, I worked in the construction industry. I was pretty good at pretending, so it took a number of years before anyone figured out that I had no idea what I was doing, and I was forced to become a humor writer instead.

At some point along the way, I worked with a guy named Ivan. As you can imagine from the name, he was Chinese... wait, no, Russian. He was Russian. He and his cousin had moved to the United States from Russia (or maybe one of the ‘ias, or the ‘stans – I don’t remember exactly) when they were in their early twenties. He was (and I am hoping, still is) a fun and enthusiastic guy, a hard worker, and an interesting fellow to talk to.

I had a lot of great conversations with him about his move to America and settling in. When he arrived he was most amazed about the amount of choices for everything at the grocery stores. He said in Russia you could usually find what you needed, but there would only be one brand of each thing. No wonder he moved. That’s just no way to live.

Fortunately, we have a lot of Russian immigrants, so he had an American-style selection of Russian ladies to choose from when it came to dating, and he was married with kids when I met him.

One day at the job site he was on the phone discussing his wife’s birthday present - with his black market hedgehog dealer, obviously. Because it had simply never occurred to me to own a hedgehog, I had no idea they were illegal to keep as pets in California. Apparently, the way he told it, every person from Russia loves hedgehogs, so it was going to be the ultimate gift for his wife.

I’m not one hundred percent sure what would happen if I gave my wife an illegal hedgehog for her birthday, but I’m certain she would have a less-than-Russian reaction. She might even report me to Fish and Game, or whomever is in charge of trying to thwart illegal hedgehog smuggling. No telling.

He had some good stories, but none better than the one about his first trip to Walmart.

He and his cousin had just arrived in the U.S., and wanted to gear up to go fishing. They were looking to purchase waders. (For those of you from New York and LA, waders are rubber overalls with attached boots, sort of like a prophylactic for your whole body. Instead of standing on the bank of the river not catching any fish, you can wade out into the water up to your chest and still not catch any fish, but you’ll be dry, like you were on the bank.)

Ivan and his cousin spoke almost no English at this point, and they were at the sporting goods section of a Walmart, which did not carry waders. This was before the internet (yes, kids, there was a time before the internet when we all had to talk to each other – dark times indeed), so with severely limited English, the two Russian twenty-something males were attempting to ask the female Walmart clerk where to go to buy waders.

That’s all well and good, and might have turned out fine, but the problem was that between the two of them, the only English fishing-related word they knew was ‘hook.’

They did not know the word ‘waders,’ nor did they know ‘boots,’ or anything else that might have described the uniquely-purposed item they were trying to source. All they knew was the word ‘clothes.’

So here are our heroes, both pantomiming the writhing, thrashing, yanking, and pulling required to actually get a pair of fishing waders on and pulled up to your chest, occasionally throwing in a whipping motion to simulate casting a fly rod, all the while repeating the same phrase they have expertly assembled in English to get their point across to the female clerk.

“We need hooker clothes.”

She called the police.

When the police department’s Russian interpreter peeled himself off the floor after his fit of hysterical laughter, he explained the misunderstanding to both parties, and everyone had a good chuckle. No charges were filed.

Learn the language, kids. (Or always have the internet handy.)

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen

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Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Alaska, Part II

My wife and I are back from Alaska, and someone seems to have sabotaged our house while we were away. Everything is swaying back and forth. My parents stayed with our boys for the week while we were away on our amazing adventure at a floating fishing lodge. When we returned I tried to ask my folks if they felt the swaying also, but they were too busy running out the door to listen to me, yelling over their shoulders something about being tricked and never spending an entire week with all three of our boys ever again. Hmm… they looked tired.

I just assumed our boys would behave better for their grandparents than they do for us. I guess I was wrong. I had all sorts of assumptions about our Alaska trip before we left, and they all turned out to be wrong, too. For instance, the fishing lodge we went to had very strict luggage limitations, complete with a pre-printed packing list. I had assumed that the reason they were only allowing me to bring two pairs of pants had something to do with weight limits on the float plane. I was wrong. I now understand that the lodge sets clothing limits because they are helpful and kind. They want to help minimize the amount of your wardrobe you will lose when you inevitably set fire to your luggage once you’re home.

Burning your clothes is the only proven method to eliminate the stench infused in them after five days of salmon fishing in an 18-foot boat. You see, fishing on the ocean in Alaska is brutal and messy. I assumed our once-in-a-lifetime trip would be a lot more like a relaxing vacation, but I was wrong. Our days were filled with slipping, slamming, flopping, cutting, bruising, stabbing, and bleeding. And that was just trying to get the bait on the hook. You should have seen what happened once a fish was actually in the boat!

I had also assumed, based on all the talk about how many fish we were sure to catch, that catching said fish would be easy. I was wrong. Before arriving, I just figured you would put the line in the water, move the boat forward, and fish from all over the surrounding ocean would come to you. Not so. It turns out you are supposed to know where they are, using something called “local knowledge,” and you have to actually take the boat to them, and you are supposed to know what they are thinking based on a whole host of considerations.

Factors that affect where the fish are and how and why they might eat your bait include, but are not limited to: tides, currents, water depth contours, kelp, lure color, spinning lure accessories, spinning lure accessory color, spinning lure accessory spin rate, bait freshness, whale activity, boat speed relative to current speed, and direction of boat travel. We were also told later in the week that it was important to make sure your bait and lures were actually underwater, down where the fish are, and not skipping across the top of the water while you eat a sandwich, drink a beer, and look for whales. So many technical considerations.

All the other people who were staying at the lodge seemed to know all this beforehand, but I was the fishing equivalent of a hunter all decked out in camouflage with a deer rifle, wandering around the inside of a Macy's department store wondering why he’s not seeing any big bucks.

After re-watching the lodge’s orientation video a few times, my wife and I finally figured it out and started catching a lot of salmon. (Unfortunately, it was on the last day of our trip.) Apart from salmon tips, the video also explained how to operate the harpoon when landing a halibut. I had assumed I would not need to harpoon anything while in Alaska, but again, I was wrong. Sort of. You see, I am male, so naturally I have wanted to harpoon something since I first heard the word harpoon as a small child. My interest in harpooning something grew exponentially when I found out what a harpoon actually was. However, since I didn’t grow up in a family of 16^th century Dutch whalers, I never had too many opportunities. I did try to harpoon my older sister once with a full-sized shovel when I was five, but I only hit her in the thumb, and I forgot to attach a rope, so she got away.

On day three, exhausted from hearing everyone else’s amazing salmon catching stories, my wife and I tried halibut fishing. This required an entirely new set of considerations, mostly revolving around how to keep the boat over the same spot on the bottom while being pushed and blown all over the place by the tide and the wind up on top. Fortunately, the boat was equipped with about $10,000 worth of navigation and sonar equipment that proved to be absolutely no help with this task. We finally decided that the only way it would work was if I just drove the boat in reverse while she fished. I was fine with that though, because I knew if she did catch a halibut, I would be the one to get to harpoon it.

After about forty-five minutes of my wife questioning me on why I was unable to keep the boat in one place, and me trying to explain to her why the earth/moon azimuths were working against me, not to mention the severe tidal friction, she finally hooked into the big one. Two hundred feet straight down, Moby Halibut was on the other end of her line. She fought and reeled for what seemed like hours as I scrambled around the deck readying the harpoon. The harpoon’s detachable razor-sharp steel tip was attached to a sturdy rope, tied on the other end to an orange float buoy, in case the monster got away from you once harpooned, he wouldn’t be able to swim too far, just like when they attached the barrels to Jaws.

Up came the denizen from the deep, and in went the harpoon, just behind the pectoral fin, just as the video had shown. He thrashed and flipped and gnashed, but he was no match for the mighty seagoing duo of Mr. and Mrs. Alaska Tourism Board. We finally wrestled him into the boat, and after ten minutes or so of figuring out where we were, we raced back to the lodge to offload the beast. Back at the dock I was beaming with pride.

Me - “Did you see where I harpooned it? Just like the video, right? Nailed it!”

Johnny the deck hand – “Yeah. Good placement, but… uh… why did you harpoon it?”

Me – “I thought you were supposed to.”

Johnny – “No, not really. I mean, it’s fine, we just really only use the harpoon for the big ones.”

Me – “This isn’t a big one?”

(Sound of the entire Alaskan fishing lodge crew laughing)

Apparently, Moby Halibut was only seventeen pounds. A “harpoon-worthy” halibut in Alaska is closer to one hundred pounds. Basically, I harpooned a Fillet-O-Fish sandwich.

I don’t care. It was awesome.

Another assumption I had made was a long-standing one, and not related to the trip specifically. I had always assumed that my wife was a nice, kind-hearted person. No so. At least, not under certain circumstances in Alaska. When we were catching big Coho salmon, many fish were lost due to poorly set hooks. They fight and thrash like crazy, so getting them into the boat can be challenging, and given the high skill level required to actually find them and hook them in the first place, losing them was more than mildly defeating.

So there I was, happily living my life one sunny morning, smiling under the assumption that I knew my wife, until I accidentally missed netting one of her salmon, sending him jumping and thrashing away from the boat. He was still hooked, but my beautiful wife began swearing at me like an angry, drunken longshoreman. I tried to calm her down by pointing out that he was still hooked and we hadn’t lost him yet, and I even reminded her of how well I had harpooned the halibut, but she just told me to shut my #@!&* and %$#!@ and net her $@!#& fish this time. Alaska is no place for the tame. (Or for children, if you happen to miss netting one of my wife’s fish.)

Hmm… I really liked it up there, but I’m glad to be back on dry land, even if it is still moving around a little. My wife hardly ever swears at me here at home. Any assumptions I may have made about her being sweet, I surely had made the reverse assumptions when envisioning the staff of an Alaskan fishing lodge. Before arriving I had imagined a team of gruff, surly, smelly seadogs, barking orders and generally being salty, since all Alaskan fishermen are obviously like the crabbers on Deadliest Catch. I was wrong yet again.

The folks at the Sea Otter Sound Lodge are some of the nicest people on planet Earth.

At least I think they are. I never accidentally missed netting one of their fish. Who knows what they might be like then?

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2014 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Alaska

I am going to Alaska for a week and I’m only allowed to bring two pairs of pants. They are apparently very strict in Alaska about what you can and can’t bring with you. They gave us a packing list that we must follow to the letter. All of our clothes must fit into a 10” x 17” x 24” carry-on. Thankfully they are allowing me to bring five pairs of underwear, but that’s it. Not one pair more!

I guess maybe it’s not really the whole state of Alaska that is regulating my wardrobe. I think the list actually came from the fishing lodge. My wife’s folks are taking us to an all-inclusive fishing resort in southeastern Alaska. “Southeastern Alaska” is another way of saying, “the funny little hanging down part on the right side of Alaska that is really basically just the western coast of Canada.” So really, my wife’s folks are taking us to western British Columbia, so we should be able to get good strong beer but we don’t need our passports.

Whoever it is that is telling me I can only bring five pairs of socks, I think they are possibly concerned about the float plane. They are not the only ones. We fly on Alaska Airlines into Ketchikan, which is located on the southern tip of the U.S. portion of western British Columbia, Canada, where we will spend the night. In the morning, as the fishing lodge’s brochure tells us, a float plane will pick us up at our hotel. I’m not quite sure how that works, but I must assume our hotel is floating on a wharf in the middle of a large body of water. I can’t wait to sleep there. The float plane then takes us directly to the floating fishing lodge. Yes, the entire fishing lodge is also floating. Apparently everything in Alaska has to float. That could be why they limit the amount of pants you bring to their state. Too much heavy luggage and the entire state could go under.

Float plane… Hmm… The only parts of the float plane trip I am really worried about are the takeoff, the flight itself, and the landing. Everything else should be fine. A float plane is basically a fuselage with boat parts and plane parts that is not good at being either a boat or a plane. Who thought that was a good idea? I mean, I’m all for adventure and everything, and life is about taking risks, but let’s face it; you’re going to try to take off from and land this thing on the ocean. Do you know what a concrete runway never does? It never goes up and down. Do you know what never jumps up in front of planes taking off and landing on concrete runways? Humpback whales, that’s what.

As far as the flight itself goes, the boat parts of the float plane do absolutely nothing to help the plane fly once it’s in the air. In fact, they create quite a bit of what pilots call “drag.” Too much extra weight - let’s say from carry-on luggage containing excessive amounts of pants and underwear - and that drag can become a problem, causing the pilots to do something they call “swearing,” and something else they call “ditching.” You do not want to be in the same plane as a pilot who is saying the word “ditch” or anything through his teeth that rhymes with it.

I am thinking only of my children. I am not personally scared of float planes, or of any other type of obviously dangerous multi-use craft that appear to be the unholy spawn of a drunken hookup between Boeing and Boston Whaler. I am far too manly for that. The thing is, there is a very minute chance that something could go horribly, horribly wrong with the virtually foolproof task of removing a top-heavy catamaran from the choppy, wavy ocean at high speed using a propeller and wings, flying that boat in the air for miles and miles over a large, wide island that you cannot land on even if you wanted to, and then putting it safely back down in the whale-infested ocean. I mean, I’m sure it will all go fine, but on the off chance it doesn’t, I would simply prefer not to orphan our children in one fell swoop if we can avoid it. So I’ll try to get separate float plane trips for me and my wife, but if we have to fly together, I will personally go through each passenger’s 10” x 17” x 24” bag and count their pants.

My wife, on the other hand, was never worried about the float plane ride. (At least, not until now.) Since we’re talking about Alaska, and we’re talking about my wife, naturally she was worried about bears. She heard “Alaska” and thought, “No way. Too many bears.” Then she heard “floating lodge” and changed her mind. No problem! We’re out in the water. Bears can’t get us. Let’s go!

I heard “floating lodge,” took one look at the aerial photograph on the website (no doubt taken from a flying catamaran of death), and noticed that the lodge was in fact floating in a nice, protected horseshoe bay, but it was only twenty or thirty feet from the shore on one side. It might have even had a little gangplank.

I didn’t bother to mention to my wife that not only can bears swim really well anyway, they could probably walk to the lodge. I want her to come with us.

Neither of us have ever been to Alaska, and we’re looking forward to it. After looking at a map, it turns out it’s pretty big. I have relatives who live there, (in the real Alaska, not western B.C.), and when we were invited to come along on the fishing trip, my first thought was, “Hey, cool, maybe we can go see my cousins.” Then I looked on a map and realized that was like living in Florida, going to Wisconsin on vacation, and while you were there, trying to swing by California to visit someone.

Maybe we can catch a quick ride over to see them on the float plane.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2014 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Fishing

I took my boys fishing this weekend. It wasn’t the first time, but it might be the last. It finally occurred to me why it’s traditionally the grandfather who takes the kids fishing.

I'm their dad. I'm the one that had to pry them out of bed with a crowbar before the sun came up. I'm the one who had to hear them complain about their pants being the wrong ones, and how disappointing it was that we didn’t have the right kind of breakfast cereal. I'm the one who had to hear them griping in the car and fighting with each other. I was already sick of hearing from them before we even got to the lake. Now we're going to commence with a sport that can frustrate even the most patient of men? And we're asking single digit-aged boys to do it? None of my kids have even a measurable ounce of patience, and two out of the three have the attention spans of a gnat on crack. The other one – the one that can really concentrate – has the attention span of a clean and sober gnat.

I’m really not even sure why we take kids fishing in the first place. It is completely unnatural. Here, kid, hold this long, flexible, whippy pole with this amazing spinning contraption that has the inviting crank handle attached to it. Now just sit there keeping the rod perfectly still and don’t turn the handle. You might as well give them bottle rockets stuck in an ice cream sundae, hand them spoons and a book of matches, and expect absolutely nothing to happen.

I would cast it out, hand them the pole, and say, “Just leave it out there,” then turn around to help one of their brothers with his pole. Before I got two steps away I would hear, “Dad, it’s back. I need more bait and I need you to cast it.”

I finally just gave up because I couldn’t think of any other ways of saying, “Stop reeling it in. Leave it alone.” I even tried Spanish in case they were bilingual and didn’t tell us.

Worse than the constant re-baiting and re-casting is dealing with the headstrong boy who is determined to cast the rod himself. I think hell might be a place where you are constantly baiting and casting rods for two small boys who can’t physically stop themselves from reeling, even under threat of death, in between unsnarling a rat’s nest of fishing line from a reel being operated by a boy who does not yet possess the motor skills, coordination, or willingness to even tie his own shoes. As all three boys complain that fishing is no fun. In the hot sun. With bugs.

At one point, my son handed me a pole that had a knotted ball of fishing line the size of a bath sponge hanging under the reel. He had actually managed to lodge some of the line back up inside the reel, but from the bottom, so it was disappearing up into the microscopic circular gap between the stationary part and the spinning part. I don’t even know how that is possible. When I asked him, “Why didn’t you stop long before it looked like this?” he answered, “I was trying to fix it.”

Added to all that, we had casting over each other’s lines, leaving the cap off the salmon eggs and spilling half the jar into the dirt and grass, walking in front of each other and snarling one boy’s fishing line around the other boy’s pole and neck, and my personal favorite, having a boy trip over the pole that I happen to be baiting, and yanking the small, barbed hook deep into my index finger. A pair of pliers and a few curse words later, and I had about had it.

The grandpas tend to handle that kind of stuff better. They didn’t start out annoyed, so they can take more of it in stride. They are older and more patient, and invariably wiser.

For instance, they bring the right kind of bait.

I was fed up with the whining, and all the mechanics of baiting, casting, and unsnarling, but mostly I was fed up with not catching anything. Needing a little break, I made a short trip down to the general store and bought a Styrofoam cup of worms. We made the switch from salmon eggs to worms, and almost could not keep the fish off the hooks after that. I made the first cast out, and had a fish on before I could even hand the pole to my son. The day improved drastically from there.

Sure, I still had to do a lot of baiting, casting, and unsnarling, but it turns out it’s not as bad when the kids aren’t complaining while you’re doing it. Apparently, it’s the catching fish part that is fun for the kids. Who knew? I always thought it was the sitting in a lawn chair drinking beer part that made fishing fun, but now that I think about it, kids don’t get to do that, so actually catching fish really improves their mood.

Grandpas already know all that, because they went through all this already. Grandpas are smart, and they have more free time. They do recon ahead of time, when they get to sit in the lawn chair and drink beer, and figure out which bait works. Then they take the kids and actually catch fish.

Genius.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2013 Marc Schmatjen

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