I can laugh now, but I wasn’t laughing when I made these fishing mistakes back then

I had fun last week while writing that column about a couple of misadventures I have lived through. I’ve had plenty of others, although none included famous baseball dignitaries on my outings.

That said, I recall the times I have experienced mistakes and errors, and I hope you all can do the same.

I recall the first time that Hall of Fame angler Spence Petros invited me to accompany him for a week of musky fishing on the legendary Eagle Lake in northwest Ontario. I was totally excited but was incredibly nervous to be in a boat with one of the best and most famous fishermen in North America.

We were on the water for less than two hours when we decided to move our boat to a new spot about 15 minutes away. I decided I would use the travel time to change my lure. I unhooked my lure and reached into Spence’s gigantic tackle box for a different lure. I pulled my hand out of the box with one of the largest lures that Spence owns.

The problem was that the lure was hooked on my thumb.

Pain? You might say that. The giant hook was buried in my thumb all the way up past the barb. That means that the hook could not be pulled out of my thumb in the reverse direction.

The huge hook was going to be pushed out a second hole that I was going to have to create by pushing the hook through my flesh and skin backwards. I still get a tad queasy when I think about this operation. I gritted my teeth and accomplished the task.

Besides being in tremendous pain, the humiliation was incredible. I felt like I had just been put into a ballgame in the World Series and dropping a groundball while my uniform pants were falling to my ankles.

I could not have been more embarrassed.

How did Spence handle the snafu? He just stared at me and shook his head in disgust and said to me, “I guess you’re going to be a problem, aren’t you?”

I’m sure I am not the only fisherman who has suffered the embarrassment of what I did one fall day on Paw Paw Lake in Michigan.

I showed up a half-day prior to my fishing buddy, so I launched my 16-foot boat and began fishing. I felt that my boat was riding low in the water, and I couldn’t figure out why. I flicked on the switch for the bilge pump and saw it was ejecting water at a tremendous pace. This couldn’t be. It was a dry boat when I launched.

All of a sudden, it dawned on me that I had never put the drain plug in the transom of the boat. I was taking on water at a tremendous rate.

I realized that my shoes were getting wet and this was a sign that sinking was imminent. I was in a channel and headed to the shoreline. I was in about 4 feet of water and had no other choice but to dive in with my drain plug in hand to stanch the flow. Me trying to get my rather plump figure back in the boat must have been quite a laughable sight for the few passersby that saw me.

I didn’t sink and I didn’t drown, so seeing that this is the sports page, I’ll say “No harm, no foul.”

• Daily Herald Outdoors columnist Steve Sarley can be reached at sarfishing@yahoo.com.