This is a sad fishing story. Last week while I was fishing in the Canadian Boundary Waters, I was using my casting rod with a top water bait. On one cast I hooked what appeared to be a nice sized small mouth bass with a lot of fight. As I got him close to the boat, he threw the lure. Excited by the exchange, I quickly cocked my arm and cast again.

Only this time I heard a loud crack. I looked in the water to see my lure only ten or so feet from the boat. What had made that noise? I looked at my hand and the only thing I saw was the handle to my rod. Where was the rest of it? I looked back at the water and saw the rest of the rod, the casting spool and my lure.

I stuttered to my brother in the front of the boat, “Reid, stop the…look…that, that’s my…look in the water.” He glanced over in time to watch the whole thing sink to the bottom of the lake.

I kept the handle of the rod as a souvenir of one of my saddest moments in fishing. That rod was probably twenty or more years old. Perhaps its time had come, but I’d have never guessed it would come in such dramatic fashion.