fishing

Posted by admin | May 7, 2020

On a nice, April day with the haze of prairie fires hanging around and the promise of a beautiful sunset and beautiful pink full moon, my wife and I set sail on our little boat for an evening of fishing and site seeing. One of our favorite places on the lake is an eagle’s nest with a couple and their brood (I saw one eaglet in addition to the two parents). After a little bit of cruising, we put our poles in the water and started trolling. I don’t think my pole was in ten minutes before hooking in a 3.48lb, 19-inch striped bass. It fought me at first, grew tired and let me pull it almost to the boat where it then fought some more. My wife got the net under it to help me get it out of the water, but it hardly needed that. The sucker was mine.

We fished for quite a while before our next catch just before sunset. My wife caught a nice 13-inch striped bass. It barely fought and several times she quit reeling in thinking she’d lost it. I was adamant that she reel in to at least check. Good thing she did!

After sunset in the waning light, I caught our last fish of the day. It was rather small, around 7 inches, so it was thrown back. All in all, it was a fun night on the lake. Oh, and we got a ton of pictures while we were out, too, adding to the enjoyment of the evening.

Sometimes, stories come naturally to me. Other times I must fish for the story. I do several types of writing exercises to get the juices flowing. They’ll vary from a prompt, a title, a set of character attributes, a setting, first line, and others. I then write for 10-15 minutes to get something going. Not every snippet is a winner, but others at least have a shade of a good story to it if not the start or end of something. The good ones, I use nearly verbatim and expand it to about 10 times the original length. Even if I don’t use the story, it is fun to do.

Fishing is fun, especially when you have a good fish on the line!