Catching Fish and Catching Up

I’m back! The break was good, but I missed blogging last week. I’m back in the saddle now, though.

Each year (for four years now), I’ve been invited to Rockport, TX to go fishing with a 3 other very good friends. It is a great time and I’ll blog someday about what this trip is really all about for me.

For now, think of it this way…. Put together one psychology professor/counselor, one engineer with some kind of triple-double top secret military clearance, one theologian turned sales manager, and one insurance salesman turned drilling equipment representative. The conversations range from serious, challenging, and profound all the way to utterly ridiculous and completely juvenile.

Throw in one guy’s parents who wait on us like we were royalty, The Boiling Pot restaurant, 4 days of fishing in the bay during the day, cards and movies at night, and you get a really, really, good time. Honestly, it’s more fun than an adult should probably be allowed to have.

It’s funny how guys can make anything into a competition. Each year we decide on a winner and a loser of our fishing tournament. We can’t just go fishing for the love of fishing, I guess. So we developed a system of points. 1 point for catching a game fish (usually trout and redfish, but we’ve also caught snappers and flounders). Catfish, stingrays, crabs, and rocks do not count. 2 points if the fish is big enough to be a keeper. 3 points if the fish falls into our arbitrarily defined “big” category.

For the record, the winners have been.

2004 – Aaron
2005 – Brett
2006 – Aaron
2007 – Brett

Thom and Matt have been embarrassed because they are the ones who actually are fishermen. They have all their own equipment and claim to know what they’re doing. Brett and I are fishing idiots (or we were before 2004). Brett came in 2005 with the book “Fishing for Dummies” (no kidding). The pressure is mounting for Thom or Matt to bring in a victory soon.

Just as significant to us is who comes in LAST, because the loser has to let the world know just how bad his fishing is -- that they fish like a girl (no offense meant toward the better gender). For example, one year the loser had to put a hot pink “Punk Princess” bumper sticker on his car for two weeks and another year it was a bright “Girl Power” bumper sticker. We’ve yet to settle on a sticker for this year, but I’m sure it will be just as conspicuous.

I’ve got ideas for several blog posts swimming around in my head, some serious and some not so much. I’m looking forward to catching up.

AN