My birthday on the Delaware

It was my birthday last Thurs and I took the day off from work to go fishing. My friend Lance was on vacation so we decided to go to the Delaware river. It had rained pretty heavily the night before and the water was pretty heavily stained, basically only a couple shades short of being chocolate milk. The fishing was pretty disappointing. Lance caught one smallmouth that was not very big. I caught 2 channel cats also not that big. I caught off of a spinner so that was pretty cool. The fishing was bad but it was a great day for finding things. Lance and I were fishing a channel between 2 small islands, we were walking down the shoreline of the larger island just stopping to cast every 10 or 20 feet. Lance had stopped to make a few cats so I walked by him. About 20 feet past him I saw a small plastic bag on sure,. I saw something in so I bent to pick it up. The "something" turned out to be $63! That alone would have made the trip worthwhile but more was to come.

We stopped a couple of hundred yards further down and just threw our lines out and sat down to relax for a while. For laughs we started trying to chip rocks into arrowheads or spearheads. I picked up one rock and it turned out to have some fossil imprints of seashells. This was turning out to be a fun little trip! In about the same area we saw a bald eagle. It was the first one Lance had ever seen and only about the 2nd one I had ever seen. as we started to walk down the shoreline again. By this time I was keeping my eyes open. A good thing I was because this time I found a fishing reel! It was an Abu-Garcia reel. It wasn't a very high quality one but it was in almost perfect shape. By this time Lance and I had realized that this had turned from a simple fishing trip into one of our patented adventures.

A small digression here. Lance and I have a habit of having adventures. They aren't always good adventures though. We define an adventure as something that happens way out of the norm. Just getting lost going to a new fishing spot isn't good enough we have to get lost in a big such as winding up in the wrong county, wrong state or winding up in an area that looks as though they shot Deliverance there. Just being caught in a downpour isn't enough either. Being caught in a thunderstorm while in the middle of the river and then having to climb a 15 foot vertical wall to get out does qualify. Lance also getting poison ivy was just icing on the cake.

Okay, back to our latest adventure. After getting down to the end of the island we realized that to get back to the other end we'd have to A) walk upriver on slippery rocks with a strong current to fight. B) walk up the other side of the island through deeper water with a muddy bottom. Or C) cut overland through some very dense vegetation. We took option C since while being more painful at least didn't have the option of getting banged around by the river or finding deep mud. We found a game trail so it wasn't too nasty. We also found a small campground someone had made. It was pretty cool they had a small tent, a couple of chairs and grill setup as well as a fence made of branches. The thing that caught our eye however was the dead bird hanging from a tree. It looked an Osprey. I hope they found it dead and didn't kill it otherwise they are scumbags. After seeing that we decided it would a bad idea to look inside the tent. As Lance put it we'd either see a guy gap toothed guy with a shotgun or a dead body and neither option sounded good so we just left.

Aside from that bit of weirdness it was a very good day. I just hope next time we go to that spot the fishing is better.