The Last GoodBye

Today I am going to take a brief detour from my chronicles of fishing to talk about the loss of one who was arguably my best friend, at least on some days.   Sweety joined us in 2004.  My daughter Kara had picked her out from a bunch of other mini-dachshunds, or more accurately I believe Sweety picked out Kara.  Sweety had become a core member of our family.   Sure, she was just a dog, but she really was one of us.  We cared for her and spoiled her, and in return we received her never-ending and unconditional love- and even this isn’t something you can expect from her human counterparts.  Sweety always had to be touching you, and if you were sitting- she was surely in your lap.  That’s how much she loved us.  And yes, she slept in the big person bed, always tight-pressed up against me.  That’s just how we rolled. 

Sweety left us suddenly on May 29.  Her heart, which was enlarged, finally could not keep pace with its demands.  And the details of this last day are difficult to recall, other than she enjoyed steak for dinner and DQ ice cream for dessert.  I miss so many things about her.   Her clown-like demeanor and how she would bring her toys to me for us to play.  The way she greeted me whenever I entered the house, especially when I got home from a long day at work.  The way she would snore gently as she kept me warm on a winter night.  The grief from losing Sweety has been thick and palpable.  A week later and I am still weeping like a little sissy school-girl.  You see, I was her favorite, and everyone knew it (my wife says that we smelled alike and also that I was hairy like Sweety).  I can say that catching fish for awhile made it all just a little bit better.  And so, I now move on to tell the details of my fishing adventure this past weekend.

Saturday, June 2.  The winds were blowing hard out of the NNW, 20-25 mph.  But the forecast had them laying down a bit around 5 pm so that was all I needed.  Also, the cool front which had just blown through was expected to persist, and I knew that if the water temps could stay down a little cooler than normal that this would be good for the fishing.  And so it was.

I launched form Wenona around 3:45 pm, with expected low tide at 6:40.   I targeted the area just WNW of the Wenona harbor, on the west side of the channel.  There was one charterboat bottom-fishing there in deeper water, so I set up just to the shallow side of him and about ½ mile north.  The wind and tide moved my drifts very quickly, but 4 oz of weight was just enough to get my lines on bottom.  And as happened so many times before, the fisherman on the anchored charter boat twiddled their thumbs as they watched me pull in fish.  I was hitting about 2 fish every pass of my drift, and only using squid to get it done.  At first it was in 45 ft of water, and then it moved increasingly more shallow.  By 6 pm I was catching fish in 15 ft of water.  All fish were nice, and some were 14-15 inch class.  I put 13 in the cooler before the wind became overwhelming at around 6:30 pm, discarding only one.  I believe I would have hit my limit of croaker had it not been for the wind, but I’ll never know.  And so, I dream of my next outing and calmer waters.