Gone Fishin'

End of a long week

This year started off much like last year -- staff being trifling over things that you'd think normal adults could understand are either not acceptable or could work out amicably. As a result, I began the actual first week of school woefully underprepared.

Fortunately, it doesn't seem as if my students noticed. With the new, shorter class periods, things go by very quickly, and my experience with 45-minute class periods probably helps. I've already had students remark that "this is my favorite class of the day," and we really haven't done anything "fun" yet, like a lab. I hope I can continue to fuel their enthusiasm.

The fun doesn't end though, and I will be doing work later today on more scheduling stuff. This is because no one listens to me when I point out problems with staffing and scheduling during the summer, and now, a week into the school year, suddenly it's a problem. :(

In any event, as stressful as things are, I wanted to get out. Friday, I was at work until 7:30PM moving things from a former-science-now-ESOL classroom, and went straight to the Broken Rocker show at Blue Sky to meet up with Kyra. We talked work a little while, and we parted ways after the band's second set.

There was no camping talk from Pat, so I asked him if he was going to go fishing this weekend. He said he was probably going to go to the Dam 4 area on the Potomac River on Sunday afternoon, since he'd been there on Friday afternoon and caught a decent number of midsize smallmouth. I asked if I could join him. He seemed skeptical, but come Sunday afternoon, he loaded up my bike and an extra fishing rod, and we headed up to Dam 4.

Pat set up the rod for me initially, putting a red glitter worm on the jig. I am not good at casting, but I started to get the hang of it early on, and within the first ten minutes, had two near hits. The third time was the charm, though.

About ten inches

The stupid fish had damn near swallowed the hook though, and there was blood seeping onto my hand as I tried to get it out without killing it. Pat came over to help, and the fish did swim away under its own power, so I guess it was alright.

I ended up snagging the lure a little bit later, and on my first cast with the new one, snagged that one too. Unamused, I put a green worm (with red glitter) on the next jig, and moved about twenty feet to the left. The next cast saw success again!

Probably just about twelve inches

The second one had the hook in its mouth, so it was easy to remove, though the fish was feistier. It was thrashing around enough, even out of the water, that it took a few tries to grab so that I could pull the hook.

I didn't really catch anything except snags after that. After losing three more lures (including one that I evidently didn't tie properly :( ), I didn't have enough line left on the reel to continue. I put the rod down and watched Pat wading in the water downstream until he came back to switch to top water lures.

He let me use his other rod while he put a top water lure on the "backup", and I still just caught snags, so I was allowed to switch to a top water too. In the meantime, he caught a fish with his setup.

In the end, we both caught two fish, which was a far cry from what he'd racked up on Friday afternoon. Still, for the most part, it was peaceful and quiet, and that was the point.

Looking upstream towards the dam.

Pat also wrote about the trip on his blog. :)