The Two Stooges

Joanna and I have had some pretty funny experiences while fishing together for the past 12 years in Canada.  She calls us the Two Stooges.  I have to say it has provided us both lots of fun and laughter.

Here are two recent adventures that had us in stitches.

Our first adventure was when our friend Chris came up for a few days to pick berries and fish.  We decided to go to Heathwalt Lake for the day.  After fishing around a favorite point and not coming up with many fish, I decided to head across the lake to a spot Joanna and I had done quite well at in the spring.  One thing I forgot to factor into the equation is that in the spring there are no weeds up yet.  Now there are weeds everywhere in the shallow areas making it more difficult to fish through them.

Starting out in this new area I snagged a good sized pike which I kept.  Chris and I were trolling on the same side of the boat and Joanna on the other side.  At our last spot Chris and I had somehow gotten our lines terribly tangled up and it took a good bit of time to fix it and start fishing again.  Now we we in shallower water and we again got our lines tangled.  Chris was able to untangle us pretty quickly and she resumed fishing, but my line was still way out there and caught on something.  Joanna saw that it was caught on the underside of the front of the boat, but she couldn't reach it.  We handed her a paddle and she was able to maneuver my line free from under the boat.

I then tried reeling in my line but couldn't get it to move.  In the distance we kept seeing a fish jumping out of the water. I asked, "Is that on my line?"

I asked Joanna if she could help me by pulling it in by hand and what we found was a HUGE balled up pile of weeds on my line about three feet long and two feet wide.  It was uncanny.  It must have weighed too much for me to reel it.

Once Joanna freed my line of the piles of weeds, we came upon a small northern pike at the end of it.  We all laughed and laughed.  Chris said she was going to write a book about us and our crazy experiences.



On our second adventure Joanna and I and another friend went to Barrel Lake.  It didn't take us long to acquire two northern pikes and two nice Walleye on one chain link stringer and another nice Walleye on a second stringer.  I was hooking the stringers to a brace on the side of the Naden boat, but the chains were short and I wanted the fish to sit deeper in the water.  So, I took a rope tied to the back of the boat and hooked it through the ends of the chain stringers allowing the fish to stay deeper.  It worked fine as long as I kept trolling backwards because it would move the fish closer to the front of the boat.

However,  we were fishing in a rocky area and our lines kept getting stuck, so I would have to shift the motor gear to go forward and our fish on the chains got dangerously close to the motor.  All went well till I got MY fishing line caught in a rock and was trying to operate the motor and reel in my line going forward to free my lure at the same time.

Suddenly the motor stopped and I looked down at the prop.  To my horror, the fish and the chains and the rope were all wrapped around the motor.  Joanna grabbed my pole so I could use both hands and I lifted the motor up, leaned way out over the back to unwind everything hoping I hadn't chewed up our fish in the process.

It looked to me like we had somehow lost the stringer with one Walleye on it and I was bemoaning the fact because it was such a nice one.  But I refastened the chains and rope further up along the boat so that wouldn't happen again.

Suddenly Joanna hollered that my reel had no more line on it as the wind had drifted us so fast while I was untangling the fish from the motor.  She leaned way out of the boat , stretching as far as she could without the line breaking while I quickly restarted the motor to head back where my line was stuck.  Thankfully, we retrieved my spinner and we settled back into fishing mode.

Joanna caught another fish and when she hauled the stringer into the boat to put it on the chain, she found that we still had both stringers and the stringer that had four fish on it was broken by the motor and could have fallen into the lake, but it was tangled in the stringer with one fish and that saved us from losing the four fish.

Oh my!!  After that we felt it was time to call it a day.  Never a dull moment fishing the Two Stooges.


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