Sunday, May 11, 2008

Nine Hours, Four Beers, One Fish. (And A Song!)

This is a fish tale that is not about "the one that got away", but about ALL the ones that got away! Some of my WBAL buddies took me out to the Chesapeake Bay over the weekend for a little sport fishing... The way they figured it, we'd get on the boat by 6 am Saturday, motor on out into the bay, fill our bellies with beer, fill the cooler with fish, and be back on shore by 11 am.

Well, for the first time since college, I WAS sipping a Corona by 6 am, but pretty much nothing else went according to plan. We had 17 lines cast to catch fish, and two hours into the trip, we finally had some action. Larry Roberts reeled in a 35-inch Rockfish - it was promising to be one hell of a day. The actual fish-catching interrupted our breakfast, so we were soon back to our sandwiches and beer. It turns out we didn't have to hurry to finish our food, because that would turn out to be the ONLY fish we'd catch all day!

Our captain felt bad about the lack of action, so he continued to drive in large sweeping circles for another SEVEN hours. We did not get back to the dock until 3 pm, which was exactly one hour AFTER the start of a wedding that one of our party was supposed to be attending.

The host for this whole shindig was Dan, a really nice financial planner for one America's leading brokerage firms, who would like to make me a client, despite the fact that I currently have no discernable source of income. All I can say (with a smile) is that I surely hope Dan draws a better yield on his client's money than he does with fish!

On a somewhat more successful note, one of my fellow non-fishermen was John Patti, who DID deliver a digital copy of that nearly 30-year-old vinyl record of my college choir that I discussed a few weeks back. Now, for the first time in decades, I can once again hear myself singing as a young man! Check out this rockin version of Joshua Fit The Battle of Jericho, performed by Syracuse University's Hendricks Chapel Choir at Washington's National Cathedral in May of 1981. I'm in the back row, fifth guy from the left in the picture below...

1 comment:

randy said...

i quess you didnt shower to much in college either since there is no one standing remotely close to you