Fishing 2

by Jake Jonnes

When Abby and I were 14 and 10 we were sent down to Savannah to visit Grandma and Grandpa. Grandpa thought it would be fun rent a boat and take us fishing in the backwaters. My anxiety about the trip started immediately when I got the impression that Grandpa wasn’t paying attention to the employee explaining how to operate the rental boat.

We started winding our way through the channels of the marshes. To his credit, we did not get lost BUT…

As we were cruising, the depth finder was periodically beeping signifying that we were in less than 5 feet of water. A good grandson of a Navy Man mentioned more than once that the depth finder was beeping and the tide was going out. As Abby and I watched alligators sunning on the shores we figured our bigger threat was getting stuck and eaten alive overnight by the gnats.

After a couple hours of unproductive fishing we started back. Grandpa was now aware of his tide miscalculation and started racing the boat toward home. It wasn’t long before there were several beeps followed by the demoralizing sound of the prop burying itself into the mud. The boat came to a stop…We tried for several minutes to dig the prop out with a paddle. We needed to try something different or Grandma would have probably keeled over worried we had sunk. I decided to take my chances with the alligators we had seen previously and got into the water and started digging out the prop with my feet. After a couple minutes I had the boat free and was pushing towards deeper water. When the water was at my chest and Grandpa facing the other direction saying “a little bit farther” I stepped on something larger than my foot that moved (most likely a ray) but that was enough to me to launch myself into the boat with a terrified look on my face. I think Abby knew something had scared me and we didn’t talk about it.

This story was never told to Grandma until last week. As I told this to Sara and Grandma, their reactions were quite different. Sara was laughing, Grandma….