Bass Boat

I didn’t have much experience fishing until my mate Waldo took me out in his boat to fish for bass. His wasn’t actually a bass boat, you understand, more of an ancient wood and fiberglass mongrel, and fishing involved me sitting on the front of it trying not to slide into the water while I attempted to retrieve yet another expensive lure snagged on an unseen underwater object. Bass fishing is a totally redneck activity - it makes NASCAR look like opera – and neither Waldo or I were rednecks (although he could do a passable impression of one). It was fun though, so we’d head out every so often and sacrifice more colorful lures in bizarre shapes to the seemingly non-existent fish.

Eventually I decided to get a proper boat. Well, not a proper boat – this would have been a huge, powerful, glittery fiberglass monstrosity with GPS and fish-finding sonar everywhere, comfortable seats, a deep-V hull and storage for twenty fishing rods. It would also not have fitted in my garage, so I purchased a 17 foot aluminum boat which had the merits of being cheaper and, well, that’s about the only merit it had really. At least I owned a truck. No matter which lake we frequented, all the other boats were towed by pick-ups. No SUVs, crossovers, sporty vehicles or Jeeps. Just pick-ups. I believe the resident rednecks kill and barbecue anyone who shows up in anything else.

My neighbor at the time looked with interest at my new boat and informed me that the happiest days of his life were the day he bought his boat and the day he sold it. I was about to find out why. For a start, if I wanted to fish I had to spend 30 minutes getting everything loaded and tied down, hooking up the trailer, pulling it out of the garage and getting gas. Then two hours driving to the lake (any lake – didn’t matter – every fucking lake was exactly two hours away). Then 30 minutes more getting the stupid boat (now invisible behind my truck) backed down the ramp into the water, unhooking it and tying it to the dock, parking the truck and walking back to the dock to start the boat. This was three hours and I hadn’t even cast a line out yet. Plus it would be three hours on the way back as well. Except that by now I’d be tired, covered in sunscreen (but still burned somewhere), bitten by bugs, frustrated by lack of fish and infuriated by the narrow garage into which I’d have to reverse the trailer, with about two inches clearance either side. I taught the neighborhood some new English words when I was doing that, I can tell you! So, when all was said and done, if I fished for just five hours it would make for an eleven hour day of “fun”.

Once at the lake I had none of the natural control of my equipment exhibited by my redneck co-boaters. As I backed down the ramp suddenly the boat would turn left, or right, and I would have to figure out how to correct this, inevitably leading to over-correction and a drunken zig-zag. (Which was ironic, given that I was probably the only person at the lake not arseholed on cans of pissy beer.) Loading the boat afterwards was even worse; the trailer was impossible to position correctly – it was either in too deep (which meant the boat would just float over it rather than resting on it) or too shallow (in which case the boat wouldn’t run up far enough. And no matter how I lined up the boat it would always drift off course as I attempted to traverse the seemingly tiny distance to the trailer. The only conclusion I could reach was that I had too many teeth in my head and not enough tattoos to allow me to figure this stuff out; that seemed to be the major distinguishing feature of everyone around me.

All this might have been tolerable had there been any actual fish involved. Unfortunately fish aren’t stupid and they’ve learned to ignore all the shiny things on a line dropped into the water and waggled around by idiots in boats. I read all the advice about where to fish and came to the conclusion that the best answer was always “not here”. One cold day at the start of the season Waldo and I went out to a lake – we knew it was too early for fish to be active but we were keen anyway. We stopped at a bait shop and asked the guy behind the counter if he had any advice. He pressed one of those devices that they give to people with no voice box up against his neck and, in a voice like Stephen Hawking, replied with no hint of humor: “Go home. Stay warm.” We should have followed his advice – we didn’t get a bite the whole fucking day, and I nearly froze my balls off.

The other thing that hits you is how much work a boat is, even a small one like this. First you have to tax it, and its outboard, and its trailer. Then insure it. Winterize it. Continuously tighten bolts. Grease the hubs of the trailer wheels. And fix all the myriad things that break. This boat cost about $10k – for that money I could have bought a brand new car, with warranty, capable of running for tens of thousands of miles, never letting in water, never going wrong, never needing its hubs greased, containing the most wonderful advanced engineering. When you buy a boat you get a piece of bent tin with some wood and carpet nailed on, a motor on the back employing utterly prehistoric technology and everything made with components of the quality you would hesitate to employ on a child’s toy from China. It’s a piece of shit, which you realize once you own it, and after a couple of years of pretending that you enjoy it, eventually you sell it to some other poor bastard who at least has the benefit of getting his misery on the pre-owned market. Was I glad to see it go? You fucking bet I was. I occasionally miss fishing – the quiet morning, before anyone is around, drifting noiselessly on mirror-still water while mist hangs in the half-light; the sharp cold of a day untouched yet by anything but the first rays of the sun; the occasional splash of a fish feeding around the vegetation at the edge of the lake, every noise magnified; the feel of a tug on the line and the twitch of the rod-tip. Yeah, that’s all great - so long as it’s some other fucker who’s bringing the boat.


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison