Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Fishing

Fishing

During the 80’s and 90’s Bob (my brother-in-law) and I could be found most Friday afternoons on the Good Life, a 31foot Formula Cabin Cruiser, and later a 34 foot Wellcraft. 

We usually used it to go up and down the Intracoastal with various buddies of ours and then have dinner at a dockside restaurant like Shooters in Fort Lauderdale.

The wives and family would go out with us on Saturdays and Sundays, but not on Friday which they reserved for having dinner with my father-in-law.

We once tried sailing instead of power boating, but found it to be too much work and too slow. 

The event that convinced us to abandon sailing, was when we were out in Biscayne Bay with our wives, and wanted to go get dinner and a drink.  It took us an hour!  Way too long.

We used the boat for various recreational activities like scuba diving, occasional trips to Miami and the Keyes, anchoring off and swimming with the family and friends and taking part in the Boat Parades.

We did contemplate fishing as something we could do with the boat.

To that end, we bought expensive fishing equipment and tried to catch fish. 

No luck.

We sought advice.

Various fishermen told us we were going out at the wrong time (usually 2 PM), going to the wrong place and various other reasons why they felt we weren’t successful. 

We tried various remedies that “experts” suggested (except getting up early) to no avail.

I always felt it was because we didn’t drink beer.

I noticed that all the successful fishermen always drank a lot of beer and usually had the empty cans scattered around the boats. The fish recognized this as belonging to “real fisherman” and thus were attracted to their boats and bait.

We tended to have wine, cocktails and champagne.  I believe the fish knew the difference.  They knew we weren’t real fisherman because of the lack of beer cans.  The fish didn’t take us seriously and wouldn’t take the bait.

The next time we went, I took along some empty beer cans.

Lo and behold we caught a fish. 

It was a barracuda, but still a fish.  We had to cut the line and throw it back.

We didn’t catch anything else that day and went to dinner.

And so we continued.

Various “experts” came with us, but to no avail.  I still felt it was the “Beer Theory” that was keeping us fishless. 

We even contemplated cheating by buying fish at the fish store and claiming we caught it.

Bob eventually caught a Kingfish, not really good eating, but an edible fish.

We were all excited until we figured out that when we took into account the amount of money we spent on equipment, gas, etc., the fish cost us $500 a pound!

We went back to dining and cruising.

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