Fishing...

My family moved to a different part of town when I was almost ten. The new place was on a quiet street, just two blocks from a little lake, with a spillway where the road ran across.

My brother and I thought that would be a great fishing spot, so we trudged down there with our little rods and reels and spent many afternoons during the summer trying for a bite. Worms, bread, lures, we tried it all. Nothing worked. I don't think we ever even got a nibble, but we tried.

After a while, we decided that our problem must be that we didn't have a boat. There obviously wasn't any fish near the shore, so we needed a boat to go where the fish are. Keep in mind I was somewhere between ten and twelve, and didn't even have the normal amount of common sense most kids are endowed with.

We found a four foot by four foot piece of plywood, and some two by fours. I borrowed a hammer and some nails from my Dad (can't remember if he even knew what we were doing), and proceeded to make my version of a boat. I laid the plywood on the ground, and attached the two by fours as "rails" around the sides.

It didn't look like it would hold water, what with the large gaps at the corners and in between the sides and the bottom of the boat, so I did what any logical young boy would do - I covered the bottom with trash bags. I didn't have access to any caulk, so why not? I slit some black lawn garbage bags and cut them to fit the bottom of the boat, with enough overlapping the sides to be safe. The problem was, I didn't have any one piece of black trash bag big enough, so I had to tape a few pieces together. With that clear tape you use to wrap presents with at Christmas. No duct tape here, no sir. Only the best for our little boat.

My brother and I loaded it up onto our wagon (we called it our "boat trailer"), and managed to wrestle it down to the lowest point of the bank we could find. It didn't get halfway into the water before we knew that the jig was indeed up. We looked at each other with that "I'm not getting into THAT thing" expression, and hauled it back to the house to be dismantled and used in our tree house (another marvel of modern engineering I'll get to later).

Maybe next time.