By request from the Illinois Forum...
Just call me Joe…
By Bob Zettler
August 25, 2014
PROLOGUE. Actually, many refer to me as Dark Cloud and its one of my primary monikers when it comes to writing and life in general. I was anointed with it many years ago by Sherwood Zimmerman, a co-worker and friend who I would also break bread with most Wednesday’s at his church’s supper with he and his family. He said he was just trying to get me out of the house as I was going through a nasty divorce (is there any other kind) but I still wonder if he was trying to convert me!
Anyway, it seemed I always had some sort of weird occurrence to share with them about something happening to me that shall we say wasn't a positive occurrence. As we were both a little older, we had both read Lil Abner in the comics section of the newspaper and there was one character that Sherwood said I reminded him of and that was Joe Btfsplk. According to Wikipedia:
Joe Btfsplk: The world's worst jinx, Joe Btfsplk had a perpetually dark rain cloud over his head. Instantaneous bad luck befell anyone unfortunate enough to be in his vicinity. Though well-meaning and friendly, his reputation inevitably precedes him — so Joe is a very lonely little man. He has an apparently unpronounceable name, but creator Al Capp "pronounced" Btfsplk by simply blowing a "raspberry," or Bronx cheer.[14] Joe's personal storm cloud became one of the most iconic images in the strip.
So my friends and readers, that is how I became “Dark Cloud!”
Sure, I have been called other names, many which can’t even appear in my Blog, Bob’s Bitchings: A Dark Cloud Series, but this one stuck as well as the Old Waterfowler Whore. That one will have to wait for another time. Now that I have set the tone, let me recap recent events that ended yesterday, Sunday, August 24, 2014.
The weekend started out somewhat different as I wasn't going fishing for a change. Not due to weather but basically I hadn't felt well for a week now and wasn't sure if it was my tooth abscess or something else. So Saturday I stayed in bed late and then piddled around the house. By late afternoon I felt better and decided I would try and head to the Lake late so I could scout for geese in the morning for my friends and me as we planned on hunting them on Monday, September 1! Still, I took another nap and woke up just in time to get my gear together and head out the door a little after 9 PM. Fueled the Jeep up and got some food in Taylorville on the way for a late supper and then breakfast in the morning as I planned on quitting around Noon due to the forecast of extreme heat and humidity.
While its only 70 miles to where I can get bait late, it can take upwards of 90-100 minutes to get there, so I pushed it shall we say and arrived at 10:45 PM. Lucky for me as they closed early at 10:50 PM! Placed the minnow cooler safely in the front seat so it wouldn't spill and picked up my boat at Leprechaun Landing before heading to the Wolf Creek ramp. And since I had washed my boat, motor and trailer the Sunday before, I decided to take my time reorganizing my equipment and getting the poles ready for action! That involves making sure they aren't tangled up together and that the ones I use with a slip bobber, in fact have a slip bobber. As none of them did due to the weekend before, that took some time and I didn't make it onto the water until 1 AM.
As it was pitch black out except for the dozen or so boats equipped with bright lights for bow-fishing, I took my time traveling north to the Findlay Marina where I would spend the night. Man those lights are bright and found myself getting blinded every now and then which led me on one occasion going in circles even though I primarily use my GPS to navigate by. Still, I look up from my GPS most of the time to look for other boats and to get my bearings but it’s my GPS that gets me where I am going in the dark. Sure I have searchlights and I was using them only to discover that the one was going bad – just charged it too. I even wear a very bright headlamp and another handheld light both with CREE LED bulbs but both were going dim even though I had charged them the week before. I guess since I had been using the CREE headlamp for the previous two hours getting the boat and my gear ready I wasn't sure how long it would last…
ACT 1. Made it to the Marina after 1:30 AM and went to fishing! Criminy it was slow, so I moved around to a at least a half a dozen spots only to end up with just a couple of small Crappie not worth keeping and small 15-pound Buffalo that I caught on my light-tackle Sam Heaton pole. Gave him back to the Lake Gods and decided I needed a drink of soda from my cup sitting on the console behind me. This is where it truly starts. Several weeks ago I noticed the plastic base to my front seat had started to crack and it had grown is size to where I knew I should have already replaced it but had been unsure of whether I had enough know-how or would I need “professional” assistance.
Well this cup was just out of reach so as I stretched back and behind me, the seat base broke – no fat joke allowed. No, it didn't throw me into the lake but I went straight down to the floor up on the bow where I used the foot-controlled trolling motor. It could have been worse so maybe my Dark Cloud had a silver lining and this thought comforted me after I moved my huge Marine Cooler up onto the bow section to use as a seat. That’s when I discovered that I could now sit it on top of the livewell which allowed me a LOT more room between my feet and the inside point of the v-shaped bow. I didn't mind losing the use of the livewell as somehow it’s hose had either broken or come loose inside the boat and I had yet to take the time to address this issue as I had taken to keeping my fish fresher by placing them immediately on ice in my cooler this past summer.
ACT 2. Spent the next several hours sitting on that cooler and only left the Marina area just before 5:30 AM so I could scout for geese – sunrise was at 6:15 AM. Cruised by my first spot and was pleasantly surprised to count 38 birds, then by a second area and counted more than 40 and then set myself to fish some underwater structure in the general area to be able to watch them all and what they did after sunrise. I don’t know about you all but I find it very difficult to “re”-find my markers on my fishfinders equipped with a GPS. Sometimes I can cruise around and around and around and hopefully find it and this was one of those times.
In cruising around and throwing out marker buoys when I thought I found what I was looking for, I accidentally ran over one and caught my trolling motor’s prop around its line. No problem, I am expert at fixing this from doing it countl…several times before so I pull it out of the water and start to unwrap the line from around and inside the prop. Another life lesson, NEVER keep your foot on the foot-pedal that turns on and off the prop! Yep, I accidentally pushed down and you can guess where my fingers were. One, two, three four….Thank God, there’s my thumb too! They were cut up but still attached, and as I wanted to see when the geese came back, I just kept sucking on the wounds and letting it drip off and into the lake hoping I would cauterize before the supply ran out…
ACT 3. Back to fishing and trying to locate and stay on that marker where just last weekend I pulled several keepers out of and a bonus 8-pound Channel Catfish. I sometimes refer to myself as a lush, for when I drink, I drink to excess but then again I pretty much do everything to excess, sometimes so that I get very focused on accomplishing what I set out to do. As such, I've been known to stay on my boat upwards of 20+ hours fishing, oblivious to the elements and time. And as this day was starting out HOT AND HUMID, I had hoped to get off the lake around Noon, another five hours away. So here I am sitting on this sturdy cooler up front and watching the fishfinder’s sonar with Down Imaging and the GPS where the markers are pictured from previous excursions, careful to avoid any of the three surviving marker buoys already out but I keep sliding over to my right. This goes on for maybe ten minutes and I finally decide to look back behind me to see if anything had shifted during the night even though I knew the heaviest items were me and the cooler and we were both up on the bow.
To my horror I see that not only is the boat flooding but it is already over the transom!!!
SPOILER ALERT! To my credit, I usually do not panic but as I stood up, I looked like Bluto, John Belushi’s character in Animal House where he jumps around just before heading into the Dean’s Office smuggling in that horse. Sorry if you haven’t seen this classic movie and this scene with the horse but it’s one of the all-time greats! And here I am on the bow of my boat jumping around in my mind on what to do! Did one of the plugs come out, as I knew I had put both in – one for the drain and the other for the livewell drain. Did I hit something that ripped open the bottom and not notice it? Will the motor start? Where do I go? Shall I beach it? Where is my life jacket – Naw, I didn't even consider that yet. And the like.
First things first, I have to see if I can stop the water from coming in and swim back to the transom where water is coming over the top to see if the plugs are still in. Criminy, they are! Now what? I better see if the motor will start as it’s now sitting deeper into the water and thankfully it does. Now what, if the boat has a ruptured hull, then there is nothing I can do as the ramp is miles away and with all this water I am not going far. And that is when I see it. Somehow a stray cable has flipped the livewell switch on and it probably happened well over an hour earlier and that means a pump that can probably move about 1600 gallons out of a boat had pushed that same water into the boat!
After more than 30 minutes of pumping!
Now I have options. I am near shallow water and shoreline so even if things go totally wrong, I should be able to motor over or in the worst case, swim over. Now I have experienced forgetting to put the boat drain plugs in my boat(s) a couple of times, so I learned from others that when this happens you leave the plugs out and motor forward as the water will drain out due to pressure and the like. No way am I pulling those plugs what with this water already in the boat as I am lucky it’s still afloat!!! So with the bilge pump running (than you Jesus), I proceed to move forward at maybe 5-8 knots and that is at half throttle! This water must weigh a ton or so (“A US liquid gallon of water weighs about 8.34 pounds”) and thankfully the bilge is running AND working!
Not wanting to leave the area, I basically start doing circles and watching to make sure no more water comes over the transom. This takes time and for the first 10 minutes I decide to stay up on the bow to bring the front down and the transom up slightly, as I feel ever inch will help. Slowly, the water begins to recede and now I decide to salvage what I can as I had a lot of “Stuff” with me: five tackle boxes; a carry-on bag with miscellaneous gear like headlamps, CREE flashlights, electric fish scale, waterproof Bluetooth speaker, earphones, spare glasses; weatherproof GPS; charging cables and charger, miscellaneous fishing gear; ThermaCell and extra patches; Ziploc bags of “stuff”; dry-sacks and bags; etc. Now all this was floating or sunk in well over a foot of water above the inside deck.
I place as much as I can on the sides of the boat and anywhere I can that will allow it to drain and dry but I am discovering the Ziplock bags leak! And those new items that come sealed…they aren't waterproof either. I am not mad at this point as I am simply hoping to salvage the boat for I have no idea why it didn't sink. It must have great flotation material AND I am glad the Bilge Pump works!!! According to the time stamps on my Cell’s camera, it took nearly an hour before the bilge had drained all it could and I could stop running the boat in circles. And as I hadn't run over my marker buoys, I decided to continue fishing. Hey, the boat is running and it’s probably better to dry the boat out in the sunshine than go home with my tail between my legs where I store the boat in a shed and where it could rot and rust.
FINALE. After awhile, I give up on this spot and head to my next brushpile and I finally score a couple of Crappie. Not really big ones but they were Crappie and a couple was good enough to keep! Hit another and do pretty good but the pleasure boaters were out in force and several took joy in flying close past me with their wake bouncing me around like week-old Mexican food. Pretty soon I look at the time and it’s already 1 PM, a good hour after I had planned on leaving, so I head towards Wolf Creek. On the way there I notice the gas tank gauge not moving and begin to wonder if it’s shorted out or did my circles run it out. Never fear, as I am now close to the ramp but then that blind obsession of mine takes over from my being a “lush of life” and I begin to think about trying that one spot past the ramp.
As I get closer to Wolf, my mind is running overtime thinking up excuses on why I “need” to try one more spot. Hey, the wind is out of the south so even if my gas runs out and my battery goes dead, I can float back! Never mind it’s well over a 100 degrees with all this humidity and I only have a couple of bottle of Gatorade left…I decide to try it out. And I am catching fish even though I can’t find the structure or hold on what I find but at least the boat is drying out more! Right, that’s my excuse and I am sticking to it.
I am glad to report I didn't run out of gas but it was…5 PM when I got off the water. And while I had drunk eight or so Gatorade’s, I didn't feel too bad from the sun, heat and humidity and NOTHING ELSE WENT WRONG! I was able to get a lot of the stuff out of the boat and into my Jeep to take home to dry and made it home without further incident. Sure, I had to slam on the brakes when that car tried to pull out in front of me and I did see spots/stars for a good ten minutes after leaving the lake but I made it home by 8 PM – 23 hours after I left it – and on one of the hottest days of the year with a limit of Crappie no less! So while I kept my Dark Cloud image intact, I still survived and while my left hand looks like it’s been through a meat-grinder and my back is killing me – probably from sitting on that ice-chest for 14 hours – I am alive and the boat is on dry ground. Then again, this next weekend is the trifecta of all time. I mean I will be fishing on Saturday or Sunday and then on Monday it will be Early Season hunting for Canada geese and then Doves on Monday afternoon. Joe says what could go wrong…
Sunrise before the flood...
