Spring is happening and this topic should be hot as soon as the males in the group find this topic. Maybe we should put an ad in Porch 56 ??? And for the Topic concerning Models. My male cousins and male son made them but not any females I knew. Hmmm.... And, tins rust in Hawaii so we don't collect'um.

But, since I was the last chance for a son and I was not, I was a tom-boy instead. I climbed trees, dug my own worms for bait, and made my first fishing pole out of a broom handle and an old wooden spool from my mother's sweing box. I put little screw-in eyes up the pole to carry the fishing line, but turning that spool was really slow work. My father took pity on me and finally allowed me to have his childhood fishing rod and reel - real metal and all that! I fished forever with that one and never looked back at the green-painted broom pole.

i dug for worms too! still do once in a while. we usually go to a bait store for worms and minnows. and he has a ton of rods (even the ones my dad gave him)! and always looking for the perfect reel. i don't care. give me a pole and worms and i'm good to go!

There you go! You're my kinda fisherperson. The stuff they have out here catch 1000 pound (456Kg) marlin and the hooks alone look like the ones on a hall-tree for hanging up winter coats (except these have barbs and points on them which are frightening to behold.) The Reels are the size of large coffee cans or bigger. The kids still go to the bamboo patches and cut their own poles - the best kind! Does you son fish, yet? Mine did for a while when he was tiny, but he could not stand to hurt the fish's mouth so we got him a dip net and let him play with the guppies in our "moat" - the one with the crayfish and bullfrogs...

he gets "bored"....

He's a kid - what does he know?! I just put a plug for us in Porch 56. Modesty has gotten us nowhere...we gotta go out, rope 'um and bring'um back alive to they can read and post something!

I once spent three weeks in the Netherlands, bathing various things but never caught anything. No fishing for me, after that. I mean, I can cook mussels and like peeling the small but tasty (and these days probably poisoneous) shrimps. That gotta suffice.

I fished in the Thames as a kid and come from a fishing (and poaching) family. Caught lots of roach but nothing very big. the next brother to me (there are two of them) gave me a telescopic rod, a nice reel and lures to take to Africa.(the only present I can remember him ever giving me) I never did catch anything but I daren't tell him. I stood up to my waist in the sea with my best bikini on and they still ignored me. Others didn't but that's another story!

Poor Maggie! The fish were so astounded at your vision that they hung around with mouths agape and bit at nothing. Try a tatty old shirt and jeans next time. The men here go out on the breakwater and "soak worms" and talk story. They catch nothing and come home 8 hours later all sunburnt and tired but happy for the day away from the kids. They often use seaweed for bait here - a special kind, of course! Alexander, you are in good company. I never caught anything I could eat, either - except for the time I was 'forced' to go crabbing in the ooze of the Chesapeake Bay...

yeah, my hubby is sometimes reluctant to take me with him on the boat. we fuss at each other because i'll have found a hole (and i'm at the back of the boat) and he's in control of the trolling motor. so we'll go scooting and i'm sitting there trying to keep my lure in the hole. so we fuss but we have great fun and we're all by ourselves. he scared me once when we got stuck on a sandbar on the red river (louisiana's red river)...

Dare I ask how he scared you when you got stuck on a sandbar? Under those circumstances, most men take cahrge and are sure they will have us home safe and sound in a flash with the ingenuity which came with the why-chromosome. In circumstances like that I tend to be a true believer!

oh yeah, but with that comes the urge to curse and carry-on. i was scared because i didn't want to swim the red river with the terrible under-tow!

Gotcha! I discovered that the only safe place is in someone else's husband's boat. The Captain Bligh factor is kept in check when a non-related lady is aboard! That is being captive and abused and terrified at the same time. Not a good combo! *hugs*

Ow, don't diss old Bligh, Marcia! He's in the same league as my buddy Niccolo M. - a reasonable chap with a bad rep. I saw a special on the Bounty mutiny, and they suggested from the Bounty's logs - kept somewhere in an archive in Australia, I believe - that Bligh's prob seemed to have been: He was too kind. Yesssirnmaamthatsright - on a trip of that length (couple years?), he dealt out much less corporal and other punishment to his crew than was custom at that time. Apparently, this gave folks the idea the could get away with things... It's the romatic view of the mutineers that history propagates, not the facts - which have been researched only recently, it seems, and are not very widely known. And as to him being an able sailor - when abandoned in this little boat, he sailed off into the nothingness, working hard for weeks, and finally gained land (Australia? New Zealand? Batavia?), after getting the vessel through some very dangerous waters, etc. They showed the route he must have sailed on the map - it was thousands od sea-miles, and he could have easily missed land. He didn't. Seems he didn't lose anybody, either. I remember having been extremely impresed by this feat. Wolf, I thus assume you would have been safe if Bligh and you had been stranded on that sandbank.

Good point! Thanks for a history lesson I had not heard, though that he survived in that little boat for so long and continued his naval career after returning to England, I did know. Perhaps I should have said Blackbeard or Captain Queeg?! Anyway, being crew for one's own husband is not the best of all worlds...according to the local ladies who did just that!

*grin* thanks for that history alex!

Ladies, you're welcome! Tune in again next week when we'll find out that Attila was a nice guy, Joe Stalin liked to help old grannies cross the street, and Helmut Kohl an honorable man.

Hi alex, nice to know you're around. It's a pretty dull sunday evening.

...Alexander...does that promised post belong in the FairyTale conference?!