The Kind of Days You Try to Forget

I remember a day from the distant past when my family and I had taken a 2- or 3-day retreat so I could do some tidal river bass fishing (must have been the Pamunkey, Rappahannock or Mattaponi, cause those were the ones I usually fished back then).

The area was set up so that campers could tie off their boats a short distance out from the shoreline, then wade back and forth to their campsites.

All was fine until my return from the first day of fishing. I secured the boat, donned my hip waders, and slipped over the side. Unfortunately, I had failed to consider the fact it was now high tide. As my waders filled with water, I suddenly realized that the trek ashore was going to be near, if not totally impossible.

Let's just say that I provided a fair amount of entertainment for all the campers along the shoreline. They laughed for several minutes, even after I finally had made it ashore.

As a result of that incident, I felt some empathy for another fisherman...actually, a guide...whom I recently read about. Seems he had a new client aboard his boat. It was a tough fishing day, given the high, muddy and fast river current they were dealing with. The only place they could find any fish was in eddies.

Said the guide, "We had only caught 11 fish in six hours, which is bad for someone in my line of business."

To make matters worse, the boat's trolling motor had died halfway through the trip. Then it started raining hard...so hard that the client decided he had had enough and said he wanted to call it a day.

"I let him off at the access point," said the guide, "and beached the boat so the client could gather his gear and depart. Meanwhile, I had no choice but to sit in the pouring rain 'cause my wife had my truck, and it would be another hour before she was supposed to return for me.

"By the time she got there, I was soaked and so cold that I had to jump in the truck and warm up for a few minutes. When I returned to where I had beached the boat, it was nowhere to be found. The water had risen considerably after I beached the boat, and it now was about 50 feet from shore, headed downriver.

"I had no choice but to go in after the boat. My hip boots immediately filled, because I was in chest-deep water. I finally had to take the boots off to get into the boat.

"Once back home, I took a very long, hot shower and tried to forget just how bad this day had been."