A Fishing Story

This past Saturday, the Men's Ministry at my church organized a fishing trip to some property owned by one of the guys. Now, I haven't really been fishing in YEARS, and even then it was always with a minnow and a bobber. Not wanting to embarass myself and show my youth, I decided to try lure fishing.

A few weeks ago I tried fishing in the Brazos river where I learned two things: I had all of 5 lures in my old tackle box, and the Brazos river (and all other bodies of water in the area) are at flood stage. I fixed the first problem on Thursday with a clueless trip to Academy. I didn't have a clue what I needed to buy, and the one employee I found was no help. After staring down the aisles of worms and lures like a first-grader flipping through a calculus book, I picked up a mixture of lures and a bag of fake worms (there was literally an entire aisle of fake worms, amazing). The second problem (the elevated water levels) had actually gotten worse in the last few weeks. The rain has been so bad that ALL of the parks around Lake Waco are closed because they are all literally underwater.

So, we met up here in Waco at 6:30 to head out (that's WAY too early to be getting up on a Saturday), and we got to the guy's property at about 7:30. Since I was essentially an overgrown kid with some new toys to play with, I was a bit anxious to wet a hook. Unfortunately, the dirt road didn't exactly cooperate. There was water running down the road (now more mud than dirt) as we drove up the hill to the pond (the owner said that he had never seen that in the 30+ years he's been living there). I was able to drive the road alright, but the guy behind me got stuck, and then the guy behind him got stuck, too. We ended up spending the first hour or so getting guys out of the mud.

By 8:30 we finally got to start fishing. As I said earlier, I haven't really been fishing in a long time. This got pointed out to me as I was stringing up my fake worm when one of the guys said "you're doing that wrong". But he was gracious enough to show me how to properly load a fake worm onto a hook. I also picked up the wrong kind of weight for this application, but he loaned me one of his. After a few casts and a quick lesson in how to fish with a fake worm, I caught the first fish of the day for our group. It was a perch, and I remember being told growing up that the spines on it's dorsal fin will poke you if you're not careful. So, I got to get a lesson in how to get a perch off of a hook (I bet they were wondering what I was doing on a fishing trip if I didn't know how to fish). With the basics down now, I ended up catching another perch (a monster of a perch, actually) and a bass. My three fish were more than anyone else.

We drove into a nearby town for lunch at a place called the Horny Toad. While we were enjoying our burgers, in walked a living football legend, Roger Staubach. Having grown up in Houston and born in the '80s, I didn't have a clue who this guy was. The name sounded familiar, and I thought he played for the Dallas Cowboys, but I didn't know him from Burton Lawless (another Cowboy that people around here were shocked I didn't know). It turns out that Roger Staubach has some property nearby and stops into this place quite often. I didn't talk to him or try to get a signature, but it makes for a great ending to an otherwise mediocre fish story.