Lost & Found: Life is Full of Funny Little Coincidences

 

I collect what I call “lost and found” stories like some people collect old coins, pocket knives, or antiques. They’re not all that common. Generally, you lose something, and it stays lost. But not always.

The retrieval of something dear, causes poor rednecks (I am one) to shout with joy; maybe even shed a tear of happiness, so sparse are their personal belongings. Rich people can afford to lose things of value, so easily can they replace them. There’s more where that came from, right?

Not out here on Baker’s Branch.

Alan Karstetter gave me another lost and found story to add to my collection the other day at daylight out underneath the Highway 64 bridge on Lake Keystone. Alan, Snook Pollard, David Campbell and I were fishing for stripers just as a peach-colored sunrise was topping the The Keystone Ancient Forest to the east of us. It went sorta’ like this:

“Conrad, you won’t believe what happened right here about a week ago.”

“What.”

“Snook hung a nice fish, maybe a ten pounder, right here, brought it to the side of the boat, and I put the BogaGrip® in its mouth, lifted it, it gave a flop, and I lost the fish and the Grip right back into the water. Gone. Outa’ sight.”

“Oh, no.”

For those of you that don’t know, a BogaGrip, is a device designed to lock into a fish’s mouth, and lift the fish out of the water by its lower lip and weigh it at the same time, a spring scale being in the device’s handle. Their popularity began with their use in saltwater fishing areas where nearly every species you catch has teeth that will hurt you. They are not cheap. If you have one, you don’t want to throw it into the water. Some people do it anyway.

“Wait. The story’s not over. ‘Bout three days later, me ‘n Snook was back out here and danged if a dead striper, nice one, doesn’t float right by the boat with a BogaGrip in its mouth. It was mine!”

Now, Lake Keystone is a pretty big lake; lots of water, and plenty of wave-driven waves. You tell me the odds, just of him and Snook showing up at the right time. I mean, they could’ve arrived at any other time of the day, right?

Life is full of funny little coincidences. That’s Alan’s story and he’s sticking to it.

I have two or three dozen stories just like it, all remarkable in their own way, and more than once have thought about collecting them into a book. I know it would at least interest, if not sell. Alan’s story is now on my list as are two or three of my own. You may have one better.

Dead stripers are floating all over Keystone made that way by severe oxygen depletion and water temperatures of nearly 90°F. The only thing more common right now than dead Keystone stripers are the buzzards eating them. Seriously.

The four of us fished about three and a half hours beneath the 64 bridge last Saturday morning. The fishing was slow for that, one of the better striper spots on the lake, by far not a secret, and I lost count of the number of dead, bloated, striper carcasses drifting by the boat. I searched each victim for an attached BogaGrip but did not find one.

I did catch one striper that weighed about five pounds, that should have weighed about six or seven pounds, and would have in better times. David caught one that weighed about eight that probably should’ve weighed nine or ten, just going by its overall length.

Just before we called it quits, I caught a channel cat that, fat as a butterball, fought like a demon, no poor health about it. Catfish are made for this country and its attendant hot weather. Stripers are a long way from home.

The day was unseasonably cool with a fairly brisk wind right out of the north; the air very, very dry compared to lately. The weatherman said that the cool air was unusual for this time of the year. His comment couldn’t have been further from the truth.

We get a cool spell practically every year somewhere around the second week in August. We have blue winged teal every year in the state by August 15th, heading south. Ask me how I know.

Ask me if I ever found a dead fish with something I owned in its mouth that I lost three days earlier.

© 2016 Conrad M. Vollertsen