I went to bed last night at ten o’clock, which is not something I tend to do, even on my most exhausting of Fridays. But I was expecting to be up the next morning a little before five am, so it seemed like the prudent thing to do.
I should maybe explain. For Father’s Day, my mother wanted to surprise my father with a fishing trip. He used to fish a lot when he was younger, and with me when I was a boy, but it’s probably been at least a decade and a half since he’d last been out on the water with rod and reel.
We’d been researching local fishing boats and coordinating behind the scenes — which was tough, since the person whose input would probably have most been helpful…was the very person we were surprising with the trip. But we finally settled on a place and worked out this as being the best weekend for it, when all five of us — me, my parents, my sister, and her husband — could all go out on the ocean.
Of course, the plan changed slightly when my father got involved. He talked to a coworker who goes fishing a lot, did some research online, and picked a boat running out of Point Lookout that seemed best, fishing for seabass and porgies.
And that boat left the dock at 7 in the morning. Meaning we had to be there at 6. Meaning we had to leave the house a little after 5. So bed at 10 o’clock.
Except around 5 this morning, my father wasn’t feeling too well, and it was still pouring rain, so we decided to go back to sleep and maybe try the second of the half-day trips, this one setting out from Point Lookout at 1 pm.
So instead of just barely getting a reasonable 7 hours of sleep, I got a much more pleasant and weekend-ly 9.
By later in the day, my father was feeling better and the rain had completely stopped. And so we drove out and got on the boat and went fishing.
It was fun. The boat was super-crowded and a very tight fit with everyone else aboard. At times, you couldn’t even fish for fear — no, the certainty — of snagging your line on someone else’s instead of a fish. And I personally only caught one very small sea bass — which jumped from the line before I could pull it aboard, saving me the trouble of unhooking it and tossing it back — and a sea robin, which are a little like spiky catfish and would have been tossed back even if we weren’t all five of us going the catch-and-release route all day.
So it was fun. The weather was gorgeous, the fishing was decent, and even if it was a little over-crowded on the boat, I think my father had a good time, which was really the whole point of the day.
After that, we all came home for some quick, much-needed showers, and then went out again for dinner, at a local Latin place we’d been to once before.
All in all, and despite the less than usual start, not a bad day.