The lost weekend
Reel Women: In their own words
Editor’s Note: After compiling some of the best fish stories from our female fishing fans over the last month or so, FLWOutdoors.com is finally ready to share them with the public. For the next several weeks, beginning Feb. 12, we’ll feature a different submission every couple of days, with a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule beginning Feb. 16. To be sure, the stories submitted by our readers have been most impressive as well – ranging from the truly humorous to the utterly heartbreaking. We hope you’ll enjoy them as much as we did. And hopefully, as more and more women get involved in the wonderful sport of fishing, we’ll get to read and hear about many more stories from our female fans in the future. Enjoy.
Julie Smith
Santa Clarita, Calif.
The lost weekend
The weekend began too perfectly. We should have known evil was lurking behind the cacti. My husband, Rich, and I left Los Angeles Friday afternoon to pre-fish Lake Mead for the Western Outdoor News Tri-State Championship that was two weeks away. We departed early enough to avoid the throng of weekend gamblers converging on Sin City and were actually tucked away in our hotel room by 9 o’clock.
The following morning we uneventfully launched from Callville Bay into velvety smooth water that mirrored the cloudless sky. Several minutes into our run, as we burst from the Narrows into the Virgin Basin, evil peered from behind the Saguaro.
“Did you feel that?” Rich anxiously asked as he slowed the boat.
“Feel what?” I replied.
“The engine missed.”
I am thinking, “Whatever, let’s just go. I want to fish.”
So – despite Rich’s unspoken misgivings about continuing on – we continued on. Sailing past East Point at our cruising speed of 70 mph, the engine missed again and made an unmistakable popping noise before shutting down. Restart attempts resulted in a sickly cranking noise that was calamitous. Using the trolling motor, I moved us closer to shore so Rich could make a diagnosis.
Thank goodness one of us is mechanically inclined. I would have fuddled around a while before expertly declaring, “Well, it appears we are going nowhere because the engine is broken.”
Luckily, Rich knew better. When he removed the engine cowling from our Evinrude 225 H.O., water ran out – bad sign No. 1. Bad sign No. 2 came with the discovery of aluminum shards deposited after a rod blasted a quarter-size hole through the block. We were in the “Middle of Nowhere Lake Mead” with a blown motor. It was just us and the buzzards, oh yeah, and the bass we would not be catching.
Fortunately, our cell phone worked, so I called Temple Bar Marina since it was closest (we still wonder why we did not phone Callville Bay, our launching point). This lapse in judgment and inexperience with breaking down on a large body of water would lead to a series of events that are, dare I say, comical in retrospect.
While waiting for the towboat, we fished. On the fourth cast, Rich landed a 2-pounder on a spinnerbait. A depressing indication of what our fishing day might have been.
A half-hour after our Mayday, Lenny – the jovial, bearded rescuer – arrived. It took all my strength not to ask him, “Where’s Squiggy?” But I refrained. He had probably heard that line a gazillion times.
Our 40-minute voyage dangling at the end of Lenny’s towrope gave us time to think. Rich was surprisingly calm, surprisingly optimistic. It is usually me spouting things like, “It’s a good thing this happened now and not during the tournament,” or “It could be worse; we could be fighting gale-force winds and 6-foot rollers.” I was astonished at his demeanor and afraid of doing something foolish that would cause the “Real Rich” to return (I am notorious for this).
Meandering along, taking in the deserted shoreline we usually zoom by, we dreaded the exorbitant tow charge. We counted our cash, searched for coins between seat cushions, and as we paraded into Temple Bar around 9:30 a.m., still questioned whether we had enough.
Approaching the dock, Lenny unhooked us, wished us luck and motored off. Rich and I did not speak, but exchanged a wide-eyed glance that said, “Where is he going? Don’t we owe him a million dollars or something?” Being my father’s daughter, I was genetically programmed with the ultimate “honesty gene.” This gene happened to dominate on our fateful day and I whispered, “Don’t we need to pay him?”
“I don’t know,” Rich mumbled in a hushed don’t-remind-him voice.
After securing the boat, I sought out Lenny. “Don’t we owe you anything,” I demurely asked, batting my eyelashes.
“Oh no, it’s free,” he smiled, squinting into the blazing sun.
Free? What on earth is free anymore? After gentle persuasion, Lenny accepted $40. He joked, “I guess I will eat lunch today.” I smiled. Lenny became the bright spot of the day.
When I returned to Rich, who was frantically calling buddies trying to locate a spare boat for the tournament, a master plan had been formulated. We would take our Ranger to the Phoenix dealership, where it was purchased, for repair and retrieve a generous friend’s boat residing on their used lot.
All of this was splendid, but we were now in Temple Bar, 27 miles by boat and 80 miles by road away from our truck and trailer. We were hoping for a shuttle, taxi or bus to take us around, but we quickly learned these options did not exist. There were no taxis, no shuttles, no nothing. Just the buzzards and the bass we would not be catching.
As we weighed our slim options with the boat-rental man, like a mirage, a motorcade of gruff Harley dudes appeared. I considered asking for a ride, but thought better of it. For some reason it did not seem safe to climb aboard a chopper with a stranger whose T-shirt back read “If you can read this then the b@#$% fell off.” Instead we opted to rent a ski boat with a Johnson 150 (the fastest available) to transport us to Callville.
Top speed of our rough-riding red and white monster was an earth-shattering 40 mph. After an internal-organ-pounding eternity, Callville appeared on the horizon. Weaving through blissful jet skiers and pleasure boaters, Rich deposited me on the dock. Lake Mead’s extremely low water level left a mountainous ramp standing dauntingly before me. As I trudged to the top in the stifling noon heat, out of breath and soaked with sweat, I cursed myself for not being in better shape.
The truck was just as I left it, however, one minor detail had gone unnoticed by my not-so-watchful eye; it was practically running on diesel fumes. Can anything else go wrong? Not wanting to risk running out of fuel, I drove out of Lake Mead National Recreation Area to fill up before forging on.
En route to the gas station, I became suddenly aware of my famished state. Fortunately, I discovered a stash of Cheez-its. The hot plastic container holding them captive refused to open willingly. I ravenously ripped off the lid, spewing Cheez-its all over the cabs interior. I munched on the clean ones and ended up inadvertently grinding the rest into the floor mats. I always thought orange and gray looked spiffy together.
Between me and Temple Bar Marina sat an engineering marvel: Hoover Dam (note to self: huge tourist attraction, do not go this way if avoidable in the future). There were people everywhere and this slowed traffic down, which slowed me down. To make matters worse, I got trapped behind a dawdling RV. I needed one of those plastic yellow signs suction cupped to my window that read “Get out of my freaking way, I’m having a REALLY bad day.”
I roared into Temple Bar in just under two hours. We used the trolling motor to load the boat by the “head for the trailer really fast, pick up the trolling motor at the last moment, and coast on” method.
The sun was low in the horizon when we finally rolled into the hotel. We wearily covered the boat before heading to the hotel bar to watch playoff baseball and down a few well-deserved, frosty-cold beers.