It was November and the end of a fisherman's first year in his very own bass boat. He and his partner were fishing an open tournament. At the day's halfway point, they had 5 of their 8-fish limit and were feeling good about their chances. After going to a spot they had pre-fished a couple days earlier, they just had started fishing down a bank with the wind when they heard someone motoring toward them. The guys in the other boat proceeded to drop the trolling motor and started fishing only a cast away ahead of them. The flag on their trolling motor clearly signaled they also were in the tournament.
That's all it took to tick off the first boatowner. Rather than start chunking baits at the second boat and probably cause an argument, though, the first boatowner decided to motor up and leap frog 'em. He strapped his rods down, started the gas motor, and dropped the hammer. Next thing he knew, however, he was getting soaked by a spray of water. Seems he had forgotten to lift the trolling motor. Damage included a bent shaft and chewed up pinion-nut gears. Moral of the story: Learn from your stupidity. Always double- and triple-check that you have pulled up your trolling motor before you take off.
A guy and his partner were fishing a 5-fish-limit team tournament. With only 10 minutes of fishing time left, the one dude boated about a 3-lb. largemouth. There was just one problem: In the excitement of the moment, he then opened the livewell and...threw the fish back in the lake!!! Talk about a brain fart! His partner of 35 years later told him the look on his face was priceless. "We still laugh about it to this day," admitted the duo.
Remember that saying, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again?" I read about a fella who carried that saying to the extreme. It started by casting an expensive crankbait to a spot where it got hung up, and he ultimately lost the lure. He then mistakenly thought "that won't happen again," and cast another expensive lure to the same spot. Once again, he was forced to break off. As luck would have it, he ended up losing a total of four expensive lures to the same spot in as many casts before he finally figured out he would be better served to find a different area.
Unfortunately, bad luck seemed to follow this fella everywhere he went. At a later date, he once again fell victim to Murphy's Law. Seems he failed to tighten the cap on his pontoon boat after filling it with air. And when he was about halfway across the lake, he heard the cap pop off the pontoon, followed by that telltale whoosh of air subsequently shooting out the hole. It wasn't much fun realizing that he was going to be anything but dry by the time he made it back to shore.
Finally, we come to a fisherman who made it a habit never to pull the boat's drain plug because, as he put it, "I'm too scatterbrained to remember to put it back in." One morning, after having just gotten his boat out of storage at the local marina, he was planning to spend the day on the water. It wasn't 'til he had launched the boat and was parking his rig that he decided he'd better check the plug, in case the marina had pulled it. That quick check revealed no water in the bilge, so he figured he was good to go. Did I happen to mention that he planned to make a long run that day?
Anyway, after fishing for 4 or 5 hours, he was heading back when he happened to glance down and saw water coming up through the floor drain (boy! can I ever relate to that sickening sight!). He came off step and activated the bilge pump but quickly figured out it wasn't keeping up with the inflow of water. "Gotta try to get back on pad," he thought. "If I can, the water probably will drain out." He was only a mile or so from the marina at the time but still had to cross a deep-water channel. He trimmed the outboard down, dropped the hammer, and, after what seemed like an eternity, finally got on pad.
"Got it made now!" he undoubtedly was thinking, as he watched his speed reach 65...but that was before he looked up ahead and saw the big cruiser that was running up the channel. "I hit that freakin' wake and went airborne," he said. "All that water shifted to the driver's side, and that boat went like 80 degrees sideways before it hit. I found myself looking over my right shoulder straight down at the water.
"The angel that looks out for idiots was watching over me that day because the hull went down, instead of over," he continued. "I'd lost a lot of speed, so plowed through the other rollers but made it back to the ramp and trailered my boat in near-record time."
Inspection revealed that a plastic bag evidently had the bilge hole plugged when he first checked it, but then, throughout the day, it had to have been moving around, allowing more and more water to enter. After that incident, the angler started pulling the plug every trip, making a point of checking it very carefully as he pulled the transom saver each time before launch.
While all of these incidents, I think you'll agree, display a certain degree of stupidity, none probably seem as blatant as an example I saw the author of "Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid" use in one of the book's chapters. The author noted that, a couple of months earlier, he had gone fishing with a buddy.
"When we pulled his boat into the dock," he said, "I lifted up this big ol' stringer of bass, and this idiot on the dock queries, 'Hey, y'all catch all them fish?'
"Nope," I thought in silence. "Talked 'em into giving up. Here's your sign."
As the author continued, "Language is used literally by some and more figuratively by others. When we ask a person, 'How are you?' we may care to know, or we may simply want to signal that we are polite. If the person takes the question literally, discord may result when we barely wait for an answer. The person may then feel stupid for thinking that we care. Perhaps we do, but that is not what the interaction was about for us. As demonstrated in the above example, words spoken by the 'stupid' are not meant literally. They are meant to convey a friendly nod.
"Stupidity is an unkind but not infrequent attribution made by observers of behavior. Our behavior makes sense to us, or else we would not engage in it. Nevertheless, when we consider our behavior in retrospect, or when others observe us and they do not see the sense the behavior made to us at the time, the conclusion is that it was senseless, and we should have known better. Some people are slower to grasp concepts than others, but it is difficult to know whether this is because they are processing the same information less well, or because they are processing different information or the same information differently... .
"By implicitly assuming there is 'one world out there' and only one way to think about it, we remain oblivious to the difference between actors and observers. Not only do we see different things, we frequently see the same things differently. As such, it may be that the attribution of stupidity follows more from the mindlessness of the observer than from the actor's lack of mental acuity."
That's good stuff to consider before we rush to judgment the next time we're talking to someone who, in our minds, doesn't seem "to git it." As I see things, this world we live in today is in dire need of some kinder, gentler people.
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