I had an 8:30 Dr appt this morning. When I arrived at 8:20, the lady at the front desk took my info and said that will be $30 co-pay. I told her I had never paid more than $10 so I got out the insurance card as she loudly argued with me that the computer said it was $30. The card said $10 so I paid her $10 and took a seat. An hour later and with an empty waiting room, one of the other ladies behind the desk asked if she could help me. I proceeded to tell her I had been there an hour past my appt time and I was not going to waste another second waiting. Seems the 1st lady with the attitude had placed my chart under a pile of papers and nobody else even knew I was there. I was just there to get my med prescriptions renewed and started to walk out the door. One of the nurses asked me to please come back RIGHT THEN and she would take care of my appt. I got apologies from everybody in the place EXCEPT from Mrs. Attitude. By the time I got everything took care of, it was well past 10.

I had spent over an hour watching Weather Channel and saw there is some less than desirable weather moving in over the next few days. My Dad has been dying to get back out in the boat so I called him and said meet me at the house at 2, ready to get after some gills. I took care of some pressing issues at the shop and headed home. We got in the water around 2:30.

We started out in an area I had smoked gills and redears on Sunday but there were only small gills there. We hit a couple of points that usually hold fish and caught a couple of big gills, several 1- 1 1/2 pound channel cats, and Dad caught a white crappie that was about 2 pounds on a nightcrawler. Shocked the crap out of both of us. We probed several spots and retraced our tracks, picking up a few keeper gills and I caught a female redears that was at least 1 1/2 pounds and about the spew eggs. She was released immediately, just like all female redears I catch.

We got well into the afternoon and I headed back into the rear of a small cove I had never fished, hoping we might find a few. We hit paydirt immediately and ended up catching probably 30 HUGE bull gills, many 9 inches or more. The fish were out front of a line of flooded buck brush in 5 feet of water where a bunch of what we call yellow mustard had been submerged when the lake level jumped up. We released several gills I would typically not even think about releasing. We called it a day around 6.

My Dad taught me a ton of what I knew about fishing as a kid and instilled the love of the outdoors in me at an early age. I have been lucky enough to teach him a lot about tactics I have tried over the years and we have had lots of good days on the water. He is now getting to the age that I have to watch over him closely, retie most of his break-offs and make sure he is safe in the boat and quit when I see him tiring out. He can't go all day like he used to so we go as long as he is having a good time.

Today was a great day to be on the water. The fish cooperated, we came home safely and I have a cooler full of iced fish to clean in the morning. Dad said if he feels like it in the AM, he will take me to breakfast and help with the fish cleaning. I'm going to hold him to his word but at the same time, be thankful that I can still have some days on the water with him.