Before I begin, let me say that this is not just a fishing report, but is rather more like a fishing "short story." You know, the type that your 5th grade teacher made you write reports about. Except rather than being about some random and totally weird topic that you probably don't care about, it's about fishing.

This entire trip was so strange and yet so enjoyable that I simply have to recount the entire tale. So after finishing work today my wife met me and we drove up to Lake Cassidy to do some evening fishing. We got to the lake probably around 5:15pm and had the raft in the water at about 5:30pm. After having paddled no more than 30 feet out I heard the dreaded hissing of a leak in the raft that I bought new and had only used twice up until this trip. Naturally, I didn't have a patch kit or any sort of tape in the raft or in the car, but not wanting to forego the entire trip I began thinking of alternatives as any good captain of a 9' inflatable would do. The only possibility I came across was crazy at best, and that was to use Powerbait to try plug the hole. So I dug a jar out of my tackle box and it just so happened that it actually worked; and not only did it work then, but my Powerbait patch worked for the rest of the night without once needing maintenance. Crisis averted, on to the fishing.

We rowed a short ways down the lake and began to fish the west side lily pad edges much as we had when we were out on the lake the Friday night before. Our setups consisted of 1/32oz. jigs anywhere between 6' and 3' under the float. I started with a white curly tail grub and my wife used a black tube jig with chartreuse tentacles all night. Both of us were also tipping the hooks with pieces of night crawler. We started getting some bites here and there, but nothing was really sticking until my wife finally got a good "bobber down" and set the hook on what appeared to be a nice fish. I was pretty excited about this, seeing as the bend in her rod indicated it was actually something substantial, not just another dink sunfish like we had caught so many of on the previous trip. As she got the fish up to the raft I pulled it out of the water hoping to find a nice fat crappie, but instead it was a Rainbow Trout. Not expecting this at all, considering the bath water temperature of the lake as well as the fishing style we were using, we decided to keep the fish anyway. Not long after that she got another good bobber down and I started getting all excited again at the prospect of a slab crappie. But it wasn't a crappie, nor a rainbow, nor any one of the three other types of fish we had caught so far out of Cassidy. It was yet another type of fish out of the seemingly endless variety of fish in that lake. When I finally got a look at it I was shocked to see that she had just caught a nice size Brown Bullhead catfish, to which her reaction was amazement and joy, considering that catching a catfish had made its way onto her bucket list of things to do.

So that was the second fish of the night that was totally unexpected, not so much because of the water temperature as it was with the rainbow, but because we were bobber fishing. Those who know the catfish know that you don't bobber fish for them, seeing as they typically lurk in the mud at the bottom of the lake. Perhaps there are some out there who do indeed intentionally bobber fish for the cats, and if so, more power to you because it obviously works. I had just never heard of anyone doing it. Oh well. A short while later (and after switching to a red tube jig with yellow tentacles, I believe) I finally managed to get a fish on after having missed the hook set on at least a half dozen good strikes. It's another rainbow, and by now things just start getting weirder. Not long after that rainbow my rod goes off again and I get our second bullhead of the evening up to the raft. For those that know bullhead, you know that they have spikes; and for those that know spikes, you know that they don't mix with rafts...apparently unless you have copious amounts of Powerbait for plugging holes.

Since this fish was on my line, rather than my wife's line, I had to get creative on how to get it onto the stringer while still dealing with my pole and yet not letting the fish sink our raft. It so happened that I hadn't brought along my net that night, thinking we weren't going to need it even if we did catch some big crappie. I had also begun to think that the net was bad luck, seeing as I had brought it on the two previous raft outings and both of those outings had yielded no keeper sized fish. Maybe the net was bad luck, and maybe if I had brought it we wouldn't have caught anything, but I was definitely wishing I had it by this point. I finally ended up laying the fish in the open lid of my tackle box, where my wife's sunglasses were laying as well. As it would so happen, the fish flopped, as fish do, and managed to flop so perfectly that it literally launched her sunglasses right out of the raft and into the water a good two or three feet away.

It was like watching a train wreck. Time slowed down as I saw the glasses sail past my left shoulder and land in the water. I briefly hoped that they might float seeing as they were made of plastic, but that hope sunk just as quickly as the sunglasses.....in about 0.5 seconds....never to be seen again. So we continued fishing and continued catching fish that we weren't supposed to be catching, while our actual targets, some slab crappie, were still not showing themselves. My wife finally managed to hook into a crappie, albeit not a keeper, shortly thereafter and I decided to switch over to a black woolly bugger, probably about size 10, when I started seeing lots of fish rising. This woolly bugger switch is significant, and the reason why is because I had yet to ever catch a fish on a fly even though I had tried numerous times. Well it just so happened that tonight was my lucky night, and on my second or third cast I finally had one of the elusive crappie slam my fly on a slow retrieve. It was too small to keep, but was still significant nonetheless because it was my first fish ever caught on a fly.

By this point the mosquitoes were feasting on us and it was getting dark, so we decided to head in. Just as I was packing up the gear to leave my wife says "I just saw lightning over there." Naturally, that is just the sort of thing you want to hear when you are out on a lake at dusk in a raft plugged up with Powerbait. I had checked the forecast earlier and wasn't expecting the lightning storms until the next day, but I guess that is fitting considering how everything else was going that night. Needless to say, we booked it out of there and made it back to the car just fine.

If only all fishing trips could be so eventful.

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