Me, Motor Skills & Fishing

Let's just say, when it comes to any sort of coordination, I am deficient. I could be looking at a wall and walk into it (and, in fact, have done so). Also, if I get flustered, all logic goes out the window; I can make quick decisions while in such a state, but they are the worst possible and most illogical decisions ever made. Finally, while I love being outside, if it involves doing something that involves motor skills, much less while flustered, nothing good will happen. This brings us to my fishing trip last night with Jeremy.

The first problem is that we have entirely different "styles" of fishing. I like to bring a book, relax, look around the river, and if something happens to get stuck on my 1 line, I reel it in. Jeremy, on the other hand stares intently and nonstop at each of 2-4 poles he has in the river and is constantly springing up to reel in. As you can imagine, my style of fishing annoys him. So, last night I decided to try his way, and stared intently at my poles. I got bored. So, I was constantly reeling in, even if it was just a twig hitting the line (you never know, right?). This meant continually utilizing what low levels of coordination I had. Consequently, Jeremy spent a good portion of the evening rebaiting my hook and unsnagging my pole, and, in the meantime, growing more and more irritated and snappy with me.

That's when the first big problem occurred. I go to cast, and somehow my reel handle gets stuck in my hair as I raise the pole over my head, and the bait plops down into the water. So, I'm sitting there with a reel stuck to my head, and Jeremy starts snapping at me to get the bait out of the water before a big fish ends up hitting it. This, of course, makes perfect sense, but he has made me edgy and flustered (not that having a reel stuck in my hair didn't already do that), all thoughts flee my mind, and instinct kicks in. How do you get your line/bait out of the water? Why, reel it in of course. So, now I'm sitting there with a wad of hair wound around and around the reel handle so tight that I have made my entire pole into some sort of new hair accesory, and my bait is still in the water. By this point, I think Jeremy is ready to throw me from the boat (he still won't tell me what he was thinking). He grabs my line, pulls my bait in, turns around and sits down, leaving the pole still stuck in my hair. Not wanting to "bother" him (okay, not wanting to get yelled at), I spent the next 5 minutes fruitlessly trying to get my hair off the reel. Finally, I had to break down and ask him to cut the hair with his fishing knife, which he does while mumbling the whole time--probably about how the hell something like this could happen to me (after 10 years around me, he should just expect things like this to happen to me).

So, fishing resumes, only extremely silent as he tries to pretend I am not there (at least I think that's what he was doing). It's also getting darker and darker. Now, I am the worst person to sit still and do nothing, much less silently in the dark. Needless to say, this was not how I pictured night fishing. I'm bored, restless, and have not gotten a single bite in hours. I can't see much of anything anyway, so I become more and more fidgety, which makes Jeremy more and more irritated. Finally, he decides we should just go. We have about a mile of dark river to navigate back to the dock, and about halway back, the spotlight starts slowly dying. Suddenly, my wimpy flashlight is now the "bright" light, and I am the one in charge of verifying there is nothing in front of the boat that we can run over. This makes me even more tense--you try looking for stumps in the dark in dark water with a ligth little better than a candle! Not to mention I know nothing about boating--as this fishing trip had already illustrated, I can't manage to get an anchor set in a timely fashion or recognize which end of the boat is front or back, so how in the hell am I going to help navigate the damn thing with only dim light in a river filled with alligators!

Needless to say, by the time we got back to the dock, I was more than ready to pack it in. I was tense, edgy, and feeling horrible for having ruined my husband's relaxing fishing trip. I have a feeling similar thoughts were going through his head, otherwise he would never have told me I needed to grab the rope for mooring the boat and jump out before we hit the cement on the landing. You can probably see where this is going already: darkness, no coordination, tense, and jumping from a moving boat. Again, all logic deserts me, and without thinking, I jump. I'm not sure what happened exactly, but what felt like a long downward fall and a lot of bouncing occurred until I finally came to rest on my side on the cement (Later, Jeremy also confirmed that there was some rolling involved too and some mopey sniffling). I laid there silently with no thoughts going through my head. From up above, I hear silence, then "Are you alright?" My knee, shoulder, hand, and wrist on my right side are banged up, as well as my left knee, but I'm more immobilized by the sheer stupidity of the whole situation. "Yes," I reply, still not moving. Soon, he is looking at me over the side of the boat. "Are you sure?"

Limping up, I spend the next 10 minutes ineptly "helping" him get the boat back on the trailer. This pretty much meant I just stood there and did nothing. On the plus side, he felt so bad, he didn't make me try and do anything else, which is probably safer for both of us anyway. I can definitively say, now, that I am done with fishing for a while. I am going to play some lovely, coordination free computer games that do not cause any sort of injury for the rest of the weekend and enjoy my television.