Showoff!

And then there's the time the fishing got in the way of showing off. Dad and I were at a small Baptist retreat in the mountains of north Georgia perched on the shores of a beautiful mountain lake named Lake Louise. I was in my mid-teens, so I don't remember whether the lake was stocked. But, there were fish in it.

I know this because I know a lot about Dad. Dad loved to fish. He carried tackle always in the the trunk of the car. When he received a call to pastor a church, he'd always go to the town to check out the fishing and availability of fishing buddies first. He figured if God wanted him there, He'd provide fish for Dad to catch. Shoot, when Dad went to the bathroom for any length of time he'd take a repairable piece of tackle with him. And, he didn't like to fish unless he knew there were fish there to catch. So, when Dad said, "Let's go fishing" that day I knew I'd get to do more than just wet a hook.

Lake Louise is big; in fact it's too big to work the shoreline in just one day. So Dad set out to find us a boat. The retreat had lots of canoes, but no fishing boats. Since Dad a a little pull at the Baptist Convention level, a jonboat appeared for him.

For you yankees, foreigners or both, a jonboat is larger than a canoe, flat-bottomed and usually made of aluminum. Unless you stumble upon a new one, it will be dented and scratched -- generally beat up. It may even have a patch or two on it. This boat was no exception. It had started its life shiny and green, a green caught somewhere between John Deere and Kelly. But that had been a long time ago. Now it was mostly the color of dented and skint aluminum, its paint scratched off by untold encounters with trailers, pickup truck beds, stumps and branches too numerous to count. There even looked to be a couple of patched bullet holes in its bow (snake in the boat?).

Few boats are complete without a motor. This one came with a fairly new-looking fuel tank and hose that was firmly attached to a 10-horse Evinrude that looked as if it had been the auxiliary propulsion system for the Ark. There was no shroud, so we got to hear every noise it made. That also meant we had to manually wind the starter pull rope around the starter every time we pulled it -- that is after we found it lying on the bottom of the boat underneath the fuel tank. Bottom line, though, it ran. It moved the boat through the water out into the lake and away from the bank.

We found a promising looking cove and started to cast. Our flies were the type that enticed either bass or bream, so we felt pretty certain we'd catch fish that day. That's when the trouble started. We were just outside the range to make the fly look as if it had just fallen off a branch into the water. So, Dad asked if I needed the boat closer to the bank. Wrong question to ask a teenager with an ego. I promptly replied that I could handle it by feeding more line on each cast. Dad started to do the same. After a few casts, we had some serious line in the water. Pretty soon Dad said, " See that branch hanging next to that stump? I'm gonna lay my fly right under the branch." Which he promptly did. He raised the tip of the rod, gave it a little flick and forcefully brought the tip back to the 2:00 o'clock position. Without hesitation he cocked his arm over to the right, making it parallel to the water, and flipped the rod tip back to 10:00 o'clock.

It was poetry in motion. It was the perfect balance between man, rod, line and fly. At that moment my dad was the Monet of fly fishing. By placing that fly in the exact spot so far away from the boat, Dad presented the perfect lure to any waiting fish. Unbeknownst to him, he'd also thrown down the gauntlet in front of me.

With a circular motion I executed a near flawless 'pig-tail pickup' with my fly. Doing this can sometimes cause a fish to lunge out of the water to catch the fly as it rises. Not today. I desperately stripped line in the backswing and let it 'shoot' through the rod when my tip went back to 10:00 o'clock. But I was on the other end of the boat, so I had to make both my swings across my chest, making my cast a left-handed one but using my right hand. My fly landed within two feet of Dad's. Luckiest cast I've ever made in my life. Dad let out a whoop to encourage me, but one look from him let me know I was in for a contest.

We both knew that at the end of the day only one of us would have familial bragging rights. That set us both off; no challenge went unanswered. The flies were zipping past our heads on the backswing as we were finishing up our forward swings. Pretty soon we were both standing -- one at each end of the boat.

Did I mention we were in a jonboat? While we were busy trying to outdo each other, we didn't notice how much the boat was 'working.' The ends of the boat were twisting with each cast while the center stayed relatively calm. Remember those patches? It was only when we were ankle deep in water that we noticed something was amiss. But neither of us was willing to stop before the other. Our stubbornness and pride nearly sank us and the boat! Finally we looked at each other in mid-cast and called a truce.

But that's not the end of the story. In all this testosterone-crazed competition we were catching fish.... fish that were just getting in our way or slowing us down. We'd land them and either throw them back or just toss them on the floor of the boat. Well, now the fish had water and they were flippin' and floppin' and splashin' all over the boat.Oh, for a video of that moment!

Dad started the motor and I went to bailing. By the time we got back to the dock we had a relatively dry boat, a mess of fish and no clear-cut winner of the impromptu contest. Oh yeah, we fed a lot of folks fish that night.