An Angler Who Goes "All In"

Every once in a while, anglers like to do something special for their mates. In a case I read about online, a gent was building a koi pond for his wife on the backside of their house for Mother's Day. He worked his rear off, putting it on a steep hillside, which required his building up the side of the hill with half-moon style bricks before putting down a liner/filtration system.

In his own words, "It was a royal PITA and a lot of work."

Now let's back up a bit. This same fella had just fished a local tournament, where he did very well. For that occasion, he had decided to wear his brand new sublimated jersey, which proudly promoted all of his sponsors. Everybody thought it was pretty cool.

During that event, he had found a cove with a lot of water lilies and thought how nice it would be to have some of those for his wife's koi pond. So, following weigh-in and collecting his check, he headed back out onto the lake and made the run back to that cove. By the time he got there, the wind had come up pretty strong. He got upwind of the pad field, went to the front of the boat, and stretched out on his belly, and let the wind push him along.

As he drifted into the pads, he would reach down and grab one firmly around the stem, as low in the water as he could reach, and break it off. What he quickly discovered, though, was that those stems are very strong, and before long, he happened upon one that was so strong it pulled him right off the front deck. He went into the water head-first and stuck in the mud, from his head to past his shoulders.

In the time it took him to work free, the boat had drifted ahead and beached on the far shore. He decided just to go ahead and harvest four or five plants, then waded over to the boat, put the plants in the livewell, and headed back to the ramp. When he got there, some of the hardcore fishermen still were hanging around, having adult beverages and swapping fish stories.

As soon as he pulled up, they all started laughing, which really annoyed him, but that only was until one of them simply said, "Go into the marina and look at yourself in the mirror."

With that brand-spankin' new jersey he had on, he looked like a chocolate-dipped vanilla ice cream cone, with a mud line halfway down and still on his face.

"What could I do but laugh right alongside them," he said.

This incident ruined his new jersey, and to add insult to injury, the koi ate all the water lilies within two days of his putting them in the pond.

The appropriate saying here is: "No good deed goes unpunished."