Fishing 104

..........and when Tom told me he was a fisherman on the phone in our early conversations in January of 1998, the horror of being on the lake with bad weather came back like it had just happened. How could we not have been watching the weather, we had lived in Kansas long enough to get the feel for what tornado weather was like.

Why we felt it was so important to get the boat out of the water and unto the trailer instead of considering the safety of our family, remains a mystery.

Yet when we turned that corner with the boat on the trailer and the car lifted into the air and the wench on the boat trailer snapped and the boat flew in the air, I thought we were done for. The car was spared.

When the storm had passed, the boat was resting upside down on the bank of the lake, the engine was farther down the embankment. My tennis shoes were laying side by side with the toes peeking out of the boat as if someone had staged them. It took six men to get the boat on the trailer, remember all of them were adrenaline driven. The motor was hung back on the transom and the Anderson family went home. Bud would name the boat TUFF N NUFF.

How was I going to get around this fear? How do you avoid someone's long time sport? This man had been fishing with a stick, a string, and a hook since he was three. Oh dear....................