I See It As Just an Inherent Part of Fishing

Let's face it, if you spend much time on the water, you quickly learn one seemingly unavoidable truth: Stuff happens. I don't care how careful you are, the odds are you'll eventually find yourself in a predicament--and perhaps a lot of 'em--that was anything but funny when they occurred and which you never may be able to laugh about.

Here is a sampling of some accounts I found on the Internet:

While dock fishing on the Potomac, an angler slipped off the dock into shallow water. His shin landed on an underwater cement slab that had pencil-thick rebar protruding from it. One of the bars impaled his shin about an inch and a half deep. Once he was able to free himself and slow the bleeding, he bandaged it up as best he could and kept fishing. The wound was healing fine a week later, but he went to a nurse just to be on the safe side. She gave him a thumbs up. However, three weeks later, his injured leg had swollen to three times the size of the other one. Wanting to find out what was wrong, he went to the ER and learned that he had gotten MRSA. They managed to save his leg, but as the victim commented, "Man, was that scary!"

A couple of guys had gone fishing together when one of them made a bad cast and imbedded the hooks of a Pop-R in the side of his buddy's neck. While the buddy stood there thinking he might die from a Pop-R stuck in his jugular, the other fella just laughed. Luckily, the hooks only hit muscle, and the fella who made the errant cast paid the ER bill.

Back in the early years of bass boats, an angler was riding with a buddy in the latter's 16-foot Ouachita, with stick steering and a 60-hp Johnson. These boats had two pedestal seats that were screwed to the floor. While running wide open down the lake, the angler in the rear seat noticed his buddy's front seat starting to tilt backward from the screws coming loose. Realizing what likely was about to happen, the backseater grabbed the sides of the boat. About the same time, the buddy at the helm fell backward, jerking the stick steering down and sending the boat into a 360. "I vaguely remember being upside down and going out the back of the boat, with my shoulder and head hitting the transom running light," the backseater said. "When I came to, I was several feet underwater, not knowing where I was but did have presence of mind to look downward and see it was black and upward, where there was light." The backseater subsequently swam to the surface, where he heard a boat idling. It turned out to be his buddy who had been slung all the way to the transom but had managed to scramble back to the controls up front and idle around looking for him. Other than some severe bruising to the back of his neck and one shoulder, the backseater was OK. And soon after this incident, he went out and bought a life jacket, which he didn't have at the time this event occurred.

One spring, a fella fell out of his boat into 45-or-so-degree water after a gust of wind blew his boat sideways. "The trolling motor caught a large stump, and over I went," he said. Fortunately, he was wearing Frogg Toggs, instead of his heavier Guide Wear rainsuit. With a looser fit, the Toggs caught a lot of air inside them, and he popped right back to the surface. Then adrenaline kicked in, and three kicks later, he was hanging on the side of his boat. Said the victim, "Call me anal, but the first year I got my boat, I practiced falling overboard (in the summer in 85-degree water) and then getting back onboard. I feel like that practice a few years earlier saved me that day. When I got home from that experience, I pulled out the Bass Pro Shops catalog and ordered an inflatable life jacket, and I'm pretty religious about wearing it now."

Then there's this story about a couple of guys who were fishing for bream from a 14-foot johnboat. The bream were hanging right in front of a spillway, with a lot of current being pulled through the gate. Each time they made a pass, the bream busters would load up, "and we were catching nice ones," said the one angler. The spillway had four gates, with only one pulling water, and there was a little bridge on top for access to the power house. The two fellas just had made a pass and caught a fish when a gust of wind slung the back end of the boat into the current moving through the gate. "Next thing you know," said the one angler, "we were standing up in the boat, hanging onto the bridge. A 20-foot drop onto a cement slab is behind us, and I am wondering how to get out of this one. I flip the Motorguide on high--but no help." Luckily, there was a cement wall on the side of the gate that the two anglers could pull on while running their trolling motor on high, and they eventually were able to work their way out of the current. Lesson learned the hard way: Always be careful while fishing spillways.

For that matter, always be careful no matter where you're fishing. Things can and often do happen in the blink of an eye.

All photos used here are only representative. They in no way portray the actual events.