Last week at my favorite heavily utilized public lake, I hooked and retrieved a sunken Shimano Sedona and BPS rod that must have fallen off a boat at some point. Felt sorry about that angler's bad luck, but perhaps a little too glibly thought that someone's bad luck is sometimes results in good luck for someone else. Easy to say when you're not the bad-luck-angler.
Went back to the same lake yesterday. Spent most of the day weaving in and out of cypress trees with low hanging limbs and moss...well you can probably guess the rest.
At the end of the day I was pulling rods and reels from the boat and putting on reel covers and rod sleeves for transport home when, with a sinking feeling, noticed I had one casting rod sleeve and a Shimano reel cover left over ?
Yup. A fairly new Falcon Mansfield with its Shimano Curado MGL and an out of stock crankbait painstakingly painted by a buddy were missing.
Despite the being worn out from heat I relaunched, foolishly hoping to find the proverbial needle in a haystack...you can imagine my thought process...among the hundreds of cypress trees in the portion of the 800-acre lake I traversed, which one might have reached out and grabbed this rod from the outside of my unsecured rod holder bracket. Hundreds of overlapping nav chart breadcrumbs from this trip and every other one in the recent past could not be disentangled. Motoring around with side scan set to 15 - 20 feet either side shed no light on where it disappeared.
Just goes to show what happens you get tangled up in karma. As my mom used to say to us kids when we got too boisterous, "First you laugh, then you cry." So true, so true.
Karma is a beotch, and I'll still wiping away tears for my lost cranking outfit ?
To rub salt in the wound, I have to look at the picture (below) I sent to my buddy yesterday saying his lure handiwork was about to get wet...cruel words, get wet, in hindsight. That's what you get for tempting fate by messing around with karma ☹️?
