Tuesday, April 5, 2016

If Ever There Was a Time to Step Lightly


When I saw this photo in the latest issue of Jay Kumar's BassBlaster, I couldn't help wondering why anyone would let this many rods accumulate under his feet. Let's face it: The chances of stepping on and breaking one or more of these "tools of the trade" has to increase exponentially when this much of the casting deck is cluttered.

I was reading about an angler who had prepared about nine combos, far fewer than you see here, for a fishing trip, and he had tucked all of them away in a rod box. His plan was to swap them out as needed.

Come the dawning of the much anticipated fishing day, the angler and his buddy headed out in high spirits, looking forward to a fun day on the water. They launched and got underway without incident, thanks to a fool-proof checklist they had developed. Further, the boat ran flawlessly, and the water and weather were perfect. In short, everything was hunky-dory until the duo pulled up to their first planned fishing spot and dropped the trolling motor.

It was then that Murphy struck. The angler with nine combos rigged was taking one of them out of the rod box, which wasn't equipped with tubes. As a result, the jostling from the boat ride had tangled them. He finally managed to sort out the mess but not before snapping the tip of his prized new carrot stick--a "mood changer," indeed--and he hadn't even dropped a line in the water yet.

Not wanting to face the possibility of having to untangle any more messes, the angler decided to lay all the combos on deck and just put up with the clutter. He spent the whole day maneuvering around a rod here to keep from stepping on another one there. "Mentally draining, probably physically fatiguing, and taking any fun out of the whole trip" is how he described the situation. And the worst part of all was realizing, at the end of the day, that he hadn't even touched five of the combos, except for pulling them out of the box, stepping on them, and having to put them all away before running back to the launch site.

Perhaps the biggest realization the angler had from this experience is that it really doesn't take that long to tie on something else. Anglers everywhere just have been fooled into believing that "more always is better."

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