Ever have one of those days where it would have been allot better just to stay home and help clean house? I'm sure you have, but I thought I'd ask anyway. We opted out of the turkey hunting today and headed back to the lake for another chance at a trophy Spotted Bass. The weather was ok, a little cool, but ok. After arriving at the dock well before daylight, we noticed a breeze picked up. Nothing major, but still enough to cause a chill. If any of you are expecting a worm bite, you know wind can be a killer to a good morning.

We unloaded the boat, strapped all our gear in, checked the lights, turned our hats around backwards, and quickly began to feed the beast that propelled us out to open water. One last gear check and a quick visual eye to eye check and we were set........Hammer down! For those of you who fish with a boat, you know that a 200HP Mercury comes out quick and in an instant is picking em' up and setting em' down. The boat reared up high and came down smooth and just as the rooster tail began to rain, we both focused in just out front of the boat and directly in our path no more that 10 feet away was an eight foot log of a tree branch that had floated out in the water from the storms the night before. There was no dodging it. The branch hit in the front and the boat jumped up, but set back down. We heard it make contact on about three different places on the hull, and was pretty sure the beast had been temporarily tamed. We shut it down and checked all that you can it the black dark. Yea, I know what you're thinking and I asked the same questions over and over in my mind.

"Why were we running that fast in the dark and why didn't we have a spot light?"

The most intellegent answer I can give you at this time is I have no earthly idea! We got sat back down and decided to test the engine to evaluate the situation. The lonely beast sat in the water just as a young eaglet in the nest with it's mouth gaping just waiting to be fed. We delivered dinner yet again and this time, it wasn't so quick and wasn't so smooth. We ran it a little farther and decided to go ahead and fish for a couple of hours. (That's how die hards do it.....bust up a $20,000 boat and go ahead and fish anyway!)

Daylight came and we were knee deep in chasing spots and stripers that were busting the top of the water running shad. We didn't get a single blow up. We decided to go back to old faithful, the finesse worm, and as I stepped down into the bottom of the boat, I heard a strange uninviting squishy sloshing sound. I looked down and my heart sank. There was about an inch of water in the bottom of the boat. We had the belge pumps so we knew we wouldn't have to swim for it, but we also knew that nothing good could come out of an inch of water in the bottom of the boat.

We fished for a couple of hours and headed back and loaded the boat. We came out good on the motor. The beast just had a stripped bushing and was easily fixable. The boat was another story. We were only an inch away from not having any damage to the hull, but an inch made a difference. I guess the lesson learned here is stumps still don't grow in 60 feet of water, but a log will float in six inches!