"Fishing can make a real idiot out of you"

I have been checking out a site called Lone Star Chronicles recently. Great photography, and good outdoors stories and info. This is a recent image from Lake Tawakoni, just east of Dallas.
I've been to Tawakoni.

One of the dumbest things I ever did was on Lake Tawakoni. I had an old Lone Star ski boat, the 1959 model with the fins on it like a Cadillac, that had caught fire and destroyed the seats and canopy, everything inside, even the windshield. It was gutted, no motor, and I bought it on the trailer for 100 bucks. I had a 15 horse for it sitting in my garage. I loaded this piece of shit boat up with all sorts of amenities, seats, depth finder, trolling motor, about 1000 dollars worth.


It leaked a little; after a few hours there would be a couple inches of water in the bottom. I would have to pull the plug and run full speed across the lake to get the water out.
One day at Tawakoni I was doing just that when I came across a school of sand bass. I cut the engine, hopped up onto the hood, and started fishing away. I couldn’t get anything to hit, changed lures, and tried some more. Changed lures again, and about that time I noticed the boat was tilted to starboard a bit unnaturally, and I looked down and I had about two feet of water in the boat. It was almost to the gunwales.
Crap! The Plug! In alI the excitement, I had forgot the plug
Another minute or two, and I’d have lost her.
Fishing can make a real idiot out of you.

And the best part? This isn’t even the story I was going to tell you.
Apparently, given time to recollect, I’ve done TWO really dumb things on Tawakoni.
What I was going to tell you was the first time I went to Tawakoni I had a brand new 15 horse motor, but no boat. My girl and I went to Tawakoni and rented a john boat at a little campground, and fished up by the dam. In a little cove up there, I lost my prop on a stump. We floated to shore, found a 10 foot length of 2X8 to use as a rudder, and a big branch to fashion a sail with from our ponchos. The wind was with us, out of the Southeast; we could sail two miles across the body of the lake, and with the rudder and a little luck, just might make it back to the campground.

But the thing is, it was a stormy day. No one was on the lake, and it was misting rain. That’s why we had the ponchos. Out there on the body of the lake, a squall somewhat (a lot) larger than the one picture above kicked up, and the next thing I knew we were trying to sail a john boat with about a four foot following sea.
I felt pretty stupid, and a little scared, but the gods were with us that day. We made it across, and landed right smack dab in the middle of our campground