I got to get up to the lake and do a little Yellow Perch chasing finally. Being a weekday, there weren't many people on this very popular body of water, but before I could get out of my truck one guy managed to get ahead of me and set up near my intended base of operations.
No problem, on this particular spot if you're limited to shore fishing there are two specific posts you want to assume and since the other was open I set up there. Now this was a beautiful fall day. The sun was shining and accompanied by a light wind which thankfully wasn't enough to create a chill in this 50 degree (on the way to 70) morning.
It was about 9 am (I tried to get there earlier I really did, but while I was checking the weather on tv I made the mistake of flipping channels and there was this really good episode of "Third Watch" on and well...) and I had a bucket of minnows I'd been keeping for a week since a horrible skunking elsewhere and wanted to use them up.
Before I could take a single cast the older guy who was there bass fishing with plastic worms (at first) started chatting with me. After saying only a few words he was nice to enough to tell me that he tends to love having someone to talk to while he fishes, and I should let him know if he's talking too much.
I took that as a warning!
So over the next hour and a half we learned about each others families, how we'd both lost our brothers and fathers, how the economy was hurting but how every man is responsible for his own family, dogs and losing dogs, cooking rabbit, fishing for Steelhead, fly fishing and fly tying, home repair and probably several other things.
That was a lot for me, but that's the kind of thing you can sometimes encounter when you fish, and if you let yourself, you can really learn something. If you are really blessed, you can gain a friend. I had a good time meeting Don. The fish weren't coming in very large sizes anyway, so hey I got to meet another very good fisherman, and while I didn't get to talk much about Christ with him, I did give him my card so that he can tune in to the radio station where I work and hopefully hear more about Him there.
We both left that spot since the fish weren't really hitting, and I did fish another spot for about an hour, but on the drive home I realized that the highlight of my day was making a new buddy!
