Fishing...kind of...

Friday afternoon, the sun came out so Craig and I figured it was time to go out and exercise our newly purchased fishing licenses. In order to get started on our fishing trip we needed to stop by the local hardware store and pick up a fishing pole. Now, both of us fished as kids and we have "memories" of how to do it, but we felt a little out of our league here. Like most things, we like to jump right in and start off big and complicated. I mean, let's see the logic here. Neither of us has fished for over 10 years so why start off on something easy like a lake. No no no...go for something big like...lets say... an ocean! So here we are in the hardware store looking for a fishing pole, you know, to use in the ocean. As we stood there amongst the endless options of poles and reels, we started talking about all the fish we were going to catch in the ocean. At the end of the conversation, we reasoned that yes we needed a pole, a reel, and fishing line that could handle at "least" 50 lbs. So if you can picture the size of this thing...feel free to laugh at us, because looking back, I wish someone would have laughed at us and spared us the next 4 hours of what was to come. So here we are walking out of the store with a fishing pole that could catch a whale, a reel the size of our dog, and line as thick as a cable cord. I won't even go into detail about the lure we bought. So off we went, as proud as can be. We have some new fishing equipment and we are off to the ocean to catch a whale. So we drove the 5 miles to the beach, unloaded our huge equipment and hiked down to the water. Once we were down to the water, the first task was to tie the lure to the fishing line. Craig got his blackberry out getting ready to google how to tie a lure. Well, the bad news came when we realized we did not have service. Hmmm...what to do now. After attempting a few knots of our own we found a little demonstration picture on the back of one of our lures. phew, past that hurdle with flying colors. Next. Okay, this should be easy...throw the puppy in the water. Well, this I wish I had my camera for. See Craig has been wanting to fish since the day I met him. He randomly talks about how much he loves to fish and how bad he wants to go fishing. So I was anxiously watching his expression as he got ready to throw the line in. You should have seen the look on his face. It was this priceless huge smile. After he threw his arm forward with brute strength casting his line in, we heard a big "clunk." The fishing line went about 3 feet from his feet. Hmmm....try that again. Here we go, arm forward, line going!...., and going, and going, and going, and going, and going.....and going. Oh no. The reel had a big ol' rat nest all around it. No problem, we can fix this. I was determined to get his reel ready to go again. My poor husband, all he wants to do is fish. So I take one end of the line and start walking while Craig stands and holds the other end. Of course I had to walk and walk and walk and walk and walk and walk....and walk. (yes there were people on the beach, and yes, they were laughing). So the rat's nest finally came out and Craig started reeling the line in with me at the end of it. The line was all wrapped back up and ready for another cast. Being the engineers we are, we analyzed what went wrong and came up with a solution for the next cast. Before we did that, we decided to walk down the beach a little way since we had already done our fair share of entertaining on that end of the beach. After getting to our new spot, Craig tried it again. This time we knew it would work. There he goes, arm forward, thunk, and then line everywhere. Uh oh. Not good, rat nest. Same thing, same solution. This went on two more times. The last time, we couldn't get the tangles out, so we had to cut the HUGE line off of the HUGE reel. Of course this is not a simple task. We were sitting on the beach with line everywhere around us. That was it with this equipment. Back to the hardware store. We returned everything (except for the mess of fishing line) and got ourselves a nice little pole and reel, and some nice thin line. This fishing pole was one we both knew how to use. We didn't want to end the day without getting the line in the water so we went back to the water and cast until the sun went down. Granted we got nothing more than seaweed but we really had a good time. You would think we would learn by now and start off small, but it just isn't our style