ill fated fishing trip

Although I have been riding my bike in excess of two months, I have yet to get my license endorsement. So I was sitting there Wednesday at the Lutcher DMV, where I was greeted at the door by the ladies who apparently knew me, I swear every woman over 45 in this town knows who I am, thanks grandma. So my phone goes off and it’s Joel.
Normally a buddy calling to go fishing isn't a huge deal, but this is Joel. Little history there. You can read about it here. In any case an hour later were heading south in his little Isuzu truck and I was trying to be optimistic about the entire thing. We had sufficient sunscreen and enough beer to drown in, so after buying bait I was looking forward to pulling in a few.

The tide was at a record low, which apparently makes it hard to drive across the beach. I noticed this when the 4x4 that was attempting to pull us out became stuck also. Before jogging back to watch the wheels throw sand everywhere, Joel informed me the guy had agreed to pull us out for money. As I contemplatively sipped my beer, I studied our would-be rescuers fuming face protruding from his wallowing truck. I wondered what it would look like when I informed him we had no money. Fortunately we were spared the spectacle when another truck managed to pull us both out. His service fee was a beer, which we were more than happy to produce. How we were going to get out did not come up in conversation until later.

Apparently, the inability to catch fish makes you extremely attractive to horseflies. Even more surprisingly, beer seems to impair your ability to walk on slippery jagged rocks. Who would have thunk. Bruised and bitten we decided to call it a day.

The stretch of beach everyone drives off of to the road was doing its best rendition of the whole “death-of-dinosaurs-by-tar-pits” scene. It was fairly safe to say the little Isuzu wouldn’t fare any better than the already stuck sampling of off-road truckage. Although the thought of spending the night spooning in his diminutive truck cab was at first appealing, we both decided we wanted the hell off this beach. Luckily we had a little ingenuity on our side, as well as four five-gallon buckets. The next three and a half hours were spent hauling water from the gulf to a 200x4 foot swath of beach. It took quite a bit of water to make a patch of beach drivable, but at the rate we were going the road was taking shape pretty fast. We had a little motivation of course; aside from the desire to get home to a shower. It seems the locals, stuck and unstuck alike, decided to offer commentary on our progress but no help. Gotta love people. With buckets in both hands, I was no more capable of killing the horseflies than I was the locals. I first thought the horseflies were attracted to the masterminds of genius ideas, but they were eating Joel alive as well, so it must have been the sweat. Speaking of geniuses, Joel remembered he had Off in his truck when we were almost done. Thanks Joel.

The wet sand road worked of course, and as we drove off we gave the remaining locals the one finger salute. Our exhilaration was dampened somewhat when it started raining right after the beach was out of sight. And I do mean dampened. Fix your damn windows, Joel.

Our return home was delayed somewhat when another upstanding local decides to knock down a telephone pole onto the only road off the island. We made up this time, however, when Joel’s clutch stops working and we are forced to take all the remaining curves in fourth gear. I really need to stop doing stuff with this dude….