Plan B (Lagoon Marooned)

Aaron uses 2 match sticks, some seaweed, and an orange to fix the boat. (not really)

So the story of Saturday (opening day of deer season-turned day of fishing) goes a little something like this:

I wake up at 4:05 am ready and fired up about the day. The day is only potential for a record at this point. My thought is never that it could be record horrible, only that it could be record awesome. On this day, I was wrong...

***sidenote

You see, the last 6 months I have spent hours investing in what I would do on opening day of deer season... what I would wear, what gadgets I would need, what tree I would sit in...etc. You only can really understand why if you deer hunt, otherwise this sounds completely ridiculous.

***

After the morning prep stop to the 7-11 for some bottles of water and a granola bar, I head to Aaron's house. My arrival at 5 finds Aaron prepped and ready to roll. We just have to hook up the boat to my jeep and we are off. Well, dang. The boat trailer lights won't light up when I plug it into my wiring harness. I just got a ticket 2 days before for rolling through a stop sign, so I am not feeling real adventurous. So we head to Wal-mart to buy a couple new fuses and new ends for the wire connectors on the trailer side and the car side. After an hour wiring job (because we are not electricians) we are ready to try again...so I fired up the car, hooked up the new wiring job...nothin'. It didn't work at all. (At this point I am kicking myself for not going to trade school)

So, $20 dollars and 3 hours later....we decide it's light enough that we can just be careful and it will probably be ok. Well, we were right and it was fine. We got to the ocean 3 hours after we planned, but we made it.

After launching the boat in the water and parking the truck, I hop in and Aaron fires up the engine (but it didn't fire right up). We were off to our spot. A little bummed about the delayed cast off, but not too bad. We were fishin and had no time we had to be home (We had what I like to call "imaginary freedom"). After hitting our first spot with little fishing success, we decided to head to a new spot.

Oh, but, no. The engine was not making noise when Aaron turned the key. So, we were 5 miles from the boat ramp, marooned at sea. Aaron and I both jumped into McGyver mode and started making things up to try to get the boat to work. We were looking at all sorts of wires and wondering if we just tugged one or rewired another if we could make the boat go. I have not yet mentioned that it is 95 degrees out, not a cloud in the sky and wind of 0 mph.

After a dehydrating hour and a half of trying to hook up oranges to the battery and using fishing line to hold experiments in place, we decided to give 1 last effort before paddling... we switched to the trolling motor battery... Holy moly, It actually worked. Now the day can begin...

Then God took the day back from Satan... We headed back to the boat ramp to pick up Adam and Sterling... while there, I found out my trailer lights were now working???? Then we headed out to the Indian River and caught a bunch of trout... That was awesome. Finally the day was going as planned. It only took 8 hours to get to awesome.

So what did I learn from all of this?

I guess I learned that you should not fish on opening day of hunting season if you haven't checked your trailer lights and boat battery first, but if you do you should just go 8 hours later than you thought you would want to start since you won't get there until then anyway.

A valuable lesson, I'm sure.