Bloopers...There's No End to 'Em

It doesn't take much digging around the Internet to reach one simple, overarching conclusion: Anglers just keep setting themselves up for failure. Here are some examples I found during my latest research.

A fisherman left his boat outside one summer night, all hooked up to his vehicle and ready to roll early the next morning to a club tournament. About 30 minutes into the trip, he asked his brother, "Did you unplug the battery charger?"

"Nope" came the reply.

Having traveled down the road about 45 km already, the driver decided he'd better pull off to the side and investigate. He found they had been trailing 50 feet of extension cord, with the plug end missing, that had been ripped from the garage socket. His single comment: "Only in Canada, eh!"

Then there's this tale of a fella who was fishing the Fox River in Wisconsin. He decided to tie up at a dock in front of a riverside restaurant. About halfway through his burger, some guys came in and asked who had the gold/black bass boat that was floating down the river. All the walleye dudes got a good laugh since bass boats aren't the norm up there, but one did volunteer to take the fella to retrieve his boat. The fella with the bass boat made note of the fact that, since that event, "I tie better knots in my ropes now."

A guy just had taken delivery of a new ski boat and was screwing the mount for a fire extinguisher into what he thought was an inner shell. Like a lot of others before him, though, he learned a dear lesson about that word "ASSUME." Turns out that he wasn't putting screws in an inner liner after all. Instead, he had put four screws through the new boat's gel coat.

While the owner was busy "losing his mind," his dear wife promptly called the dealer and told him her husband was on the way there and "not to ask what happened." Luckily, the owner was on the Pro program, and the dealer made the boat look as good as new.

Four weeks later, however, during a skiing trip on a local river, the owner and his wife had just decided to call it a day. Since his wife was a good boat driver...in the owner's estimation, at least...he went to get the trailer and back it in.

Now we all know that disaster can and often does strike twice. That being said, the wife was driving the boat on the trailer when the stern got caught in the current. In the owner's words, "She panicked and went fist down on the throttle. The boat jumped over the trailer and landed on rocks. My insurance agent almost wet himself when I told him what had happened."

Any ideas about who wasn't laughing?

Finally, there's this tale about a fella who was trying to put his boat on the trailer when he heard a thud, and the boat quit moving. With no idea about what the problem was, he decided to back up and try it again. Another thud later, he finally figured out what was going on. The trolling motor was still down, and he had knocked it halfway off its mount.

This same fella drove to a lake an hour and a half away. Upon arrival, he motored all the way across the lake, then dropped the trolling motor. Trouble was it wouldn't work. Didn't take long to troubleshoot the problem: a dead battery. Drove all the way back across the lake, pulled the boat out, went to a marina boat shop, and (in his words) "paid a crapload of money" for a new battery. Said the owner even tried to charge him 75 bucks just to screw down two wingnuts. Put the boat back in water, went all the way back across the lake, and on the first cast with his flipping stick, the reel broke. And he didn't get a bite all day.

One might begin to wonder why a guy with such rotten luck would even try to go fishing. However, you gotta give him an "A" for persistence. Seems he had decided to fish a tournament with 100 of his best buddies. He met all of them, including his co-angler, at the ramp at 0-dark-30, and the co-angler, according to this fella, immediately proceeded to throw him off his launching routine.

"I jump in the boat," said the fella, "and the co-angler backs  me in. The boat floats up and spins toward the dock. When the co-angler starts to pull out, the ass of the boat swings wildly toward the ramp."

You get one guess what was wrong. If you guessed the fella had left one of the tie-down straps on, you're absolutely right. It was a slow, painful process to get the boat righted and off the trailer. To make matters worse, this event happened on the very lake where, of all things, this fella was a guide...if you can believe that.