Yeah yeah, looks pretty crappie

Even though I'm not in youth ministry right now, I just can't stay away from puns.

I don't remember if I reported that my boat broke, but it did, and I fixed it. Turns out that the part I needed to fix the trim/tilt was 40% cheaper from the Yamaha guy in Texarkana, so I had him ship it.

Since the boat is back in action, I invited my friend Trey to go fishing this morning. We went out early planning to bass fish for an hour or two and then try crappie fishing. I caught a good keeper bass in the first ten minutes. I don't generally keep bass, and today was no exception. A hundred yards or so down the lake we ran into some hybrids chasing shad in about 3 ft of water and caught five or six. Trey caught one about 17" long on a cheap telescoping pole with an Abumatic (like a Zebco 33) that really gave him a good run. I caught one a shade over 18", so he ended up in the live well.

We pulled up to a dock to crappie fish. The dock has brush under it, and there's also a brush pile about 20 yards out in front of it. As we were fishing out the end of the dock fixing to head to the brush pile, another boat came up to fish the same spot. Since we were there first, they "let" us have the brush pile and they fished the dock. I think they caught three keepers, and we did as well, plus we also caught a bunch of short fish. We left and went to another pile and caught four more keepers and then ran out of minnows. I honestly didn't figure we'd do much good, so we hadn't bought enough. Oh well.

After that we went to fish the lily pads before we went home. I had a fish hit my ribbit that was between three and four pounds, but he was running toward me the whole time and I never got a good hook set, so he threw the hook when he jumped. The very next cast the frog was smacked by one that was five or five and a half pounds, and I got the hook in him good. He jumped four or five times, but didn't get off. That's the biggest bass I've caught at Phantom, and it was 11 a.m. and probably already 95 degrees.

Then I waterskied and crashed twice. I'm really out of shape :)

I'm in a hotel in Fort Worth, because I have my round robin management interview tomorrow at 7 a.m. I went to the store tonight for about an hour and a half of scouting. I kind of figure it will go like many of the other tests in my life: I'll think I did OK and they'll think I did very well. I'll let y'all know how it turns out, although I won't officially be promoted for up to a month.