An Outdoor Happening: A Trio of Strange Miscues, Improbable Results

Several years ago, while on our annual fishing and camping trip to Long Point Campground near Sebastian Inlet, an incident occurred that still draws a chuckle. When you break it down, three miscues all happened in the blink of an eye.

The bundle of blunders came about during an impromptu late-afternoon fishing jaunt with my lifelong friend Carl. As the sun slowly sank toward the Sebastian skyline, we were in a hurry to get a line in the water during that magic catch hour.

Carl and I ran the boat to a spot at the north end of Boy Scout Island where we had scared up a few fish earlier in the week. We trolled in the last 50 yards and then started plugging. Needing both hands to occupy my rod, I set my cell phone on the left side of the center console.

As timing would have it, my phone suddenly rang. Expecting the usual afternoon call from my wife, I reached to retrieve it. But Carl, being only an arm’s length away, also went to grasp it. In that moment of simultaneous thinking, our two hands collided, bouncing the phone off the boat’s gunnel and into the water.

Thanks to cat-like reflexes, Carl snatched up the lighted phone from the clear brine mid-splash. His heroics were not rewarded, however. His sudden movement to save my phone inadvertently knocked his rod and reel—custom made for his recent retirement from the fire department—into the water.

Since I was in position in the bow of the boat, Carl yelled for me to quickly throw in the anchor to stop our fast drift in the inlet tide. I did, but this was the third part of the fishing debacle. In our haste to leave the campsite that afternoon, we had failed to secure the anchor rope to the front cleat. The swift current rapidly pushed our boat away from the position. Meanwhile, I saw the end of the line attached to the anchor disappear over the bow. A hollow feeling came over me. The only good news out of this moment of panic was it happened in front of an Australian pine tree that helped mark the location.

We returned to the tree-marked spot the next morning with a small grappling hook. Remarkably, we found both the rod and reel and the anchor line.

Sometimes, all is well that ends well, except my friend’s rod and reel spent the night on the lagoon bottom near Boy Scout Island. Two days later, the rod snapped in half thanks to a jack crevalle of considerable girth. It now occupies wall space in Carl’s “Firefighter and Fishing Memory Room.”

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• This story was featured in the Outdoor Happening section of the April 2025 issue of Florida Sportsman magazine. Learn how to subscribe.

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