A couple of years ago our group was doing some fishing on Hudson Lake and as we were heading in to a inlet I was so sure there was a guy sitting on a little bit of an island. It totally freaked me out, but as we got closer it was just a tree and bushes. I wonder what I would have done if I had been alone!!! :exclamation

ryanmbeal...you darn near might have

Hey, there's some newer voices chiming in- Welcome!

Back when a friend (same one that received the paddle I mentioned earlier) and I started bringing wives and girlfriends, his wife somehow used Tang as the au gratin part of some boxed potato mix (and Tang was never part of group food anyway). I don't know who's it was but I know it wasn't packed with the scalloped potatoes.

This was a long time ago but as punishment we probably made her do dishes that evening. I remember she used over half of the soap I packed thinking there was a little bottle like that for every day. Ummm nope, but it was still plenty.

To make up for things, she made breakfast the next day. The bacon was fine. The scrambled eggs, made in the same pan, were inedible. You could almost blow soap bubbles after the third bite. To this day I can't fathom how the bacon was fine and there was enough residual soap left in the pan to ruin the eggs - unless maybe they were scrambled in a separate pot or something instead of the pan? Huh, never thought of that possibility 'till tonight. Maybe that was it. I've told this story here before but I can't find it. I'll have to ask if she or the other three I'll see soon remembers the particulars. One of 'em is turning 50 next week and the paddle was a 30th b-day gift a few years later.

I just thought of another humbling experience, this one belongs to myself however. Two years ago I was in the Q on Louisa on I think the 2nd or 3rd island headed north from the falls with my old paddle buddy. The night before we had some nasty weather so we had decided that lightening our load by drinking down some of the rum ration was a fantastic idea that would pay us back later in the trip due to lighter packs. In theory we were well sounded. However, the next morning, paddle partner was snoring away and I decided a dip in the lake would be a good start to the day and cure the slight headache I'd acquired. I stripped down, found a nice rock to launch myself from where it was nice and deep. (keep this part in mind as I'm sure you can visualize about a 3 foot drop into the water with deep water surrounding this piece of rocky shoreline for about 20' either direction). I hit the water, feel its fresh cold attack and come to the surface and start to swim towards shore. One problem...I can't get out. The rocks I jumped off of in my morning fog of a brain were higher off the water than I could pull myself out on. So here I was wearing my nothing but my birth-rite trying to scale a basically sheer rock wall. After several slightly painful, extremely embarrassing (thankfully it was late summer and NO ONE passed by, I can only imagine PJ, DB, or Jimbo paddling by and seeing the rare two-toned skinny water sloth and the comments that would illicit) I swam around to the canoe landing and scampered back on shore with very little dignity left, but thankfully very little hangover as well.

Sometimes we like to turn our bent shafts backwards when we're meeting someone on the water just to see if we get any reaction....