When the phone rang at o’dark thirty in the morning I sprang out of bed as if someone had dumped a bucket of cold water on me, “Crap! Sorry! I didn’t even hear the alarm clocks! Give me 30 minutes; I’ll call you on the way”!

The first mistake was not getting my stuff together the night before. The second mistake was convincing myself that if by some act of God I ever did actually fall asleep, there would be any chance at all that I’d wake up in less than 2 hours. I’d been tossing & turning since 8:30 PM, refusing to believe that the hot/cold sensations I’d been toggling between all night could be the beginning of a nasty flu.

I popped a couple Tylenol on the way and once we were on the water I was feeling quite a bit better but still far from 100%. Ten minutes into our first spot an aggressive striper ripped the line out of my hands and instantly, I was cured!

We covered a lot of water over the next hour or two without finding another fish and the lack of sleep was beginning to creep up on both of us as we took turns “being guided” while we waited for the tide to start moving again.

Then it was back on!

It wasn’t till late in the day when Jeff realized his camera was in “candle-light mode” which explains the “interesting” hue in half of the pictures. I think they look kind of cool, in a “blue-ish” kind of way…

Spring was definitely in the air and it didn’t take a thermometer to tell that the water temperatures had come up quite a bit either; the savage strikes from the stripers and the determined battles that followed were sign enough.

It was really nice to see the large mouth bass active again. Even they seemed to have a little extra zip to them.

While fishing a really sweet spot that Jeff had pointed out (despite my assurance that it wasn’t any good) I got slammed by a big fish that ripped line on me and had me convinced that I was into a double digit striper.

Man can those little dudes pull when they want to!

We couldn’t have asked for a better day of fishing but when it came to an end, so did the temporary “cure” from the flu. All good things seem to come with a price and I began paying mine when I awoke the following morning, shivering, sweating, and still in my fishing clothes. It was a nasty flu that made a 10 hour flight to Europe the next day a miserable one.

Considering Jeff’s typical insistence on chipping in on the costs, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when I returned from my trip to find that he’d spent the week keeping things even. It turns out that the dues I was paying were only half of the good day’s price. The other half had been covered by Jeff with his own case of the flu. And to think that anyone has ever had the audacity to accuse me of being selfish…