Published: January 30, 2008 11:57 am            

The Outdoors: Bricklayer on the court, deadeye down the fishing hole

Originally published in the January 25, 2008, print edition.

Hoops has never been my long suit.

It became clear early on that as a basketball player, I was never going to amount to much.

My vertical?

You had to look close when I went up for a rebound to detect briefest flicker of daylight beneath my feet. The only way I was going above the rim was with a stepladder.

My jump shot had all the trajectory of a bullet and threatened to shatter the backboard. My lay-up consistently went through the hoop — from the bottom. And it’s tough to dribble when the ball is bouncing off the toes of your Converse high-tops. Now, the diameter of a regulation basketball hoop is 18 inches. And as tough as I found it to put a basketball through one, I seem to have no problem cleanly making a shot through an eight-inch hole through the ice.

On a bitterly cold morning while fishing on Lake Waubay in northeast South Dakota, I leaned over to clean the skim ice from my fishing hole.

There was the slightest splash and something quickly vanished down the hole, a clean swish.

“What was that?,” I asked my fishing partner. He looked at screen of the underwater camera. “Ummm, how about your cell phone.”

Sure enough, 22 feet below us, my cell phone rested on the sandy bottom. Just for the heck of it, my buddy pulled out his own phone and dialed my number, watching the monitor.

Not surprisingly, my cell phone did not glow or ring from its watery resting place as his call went directly to my voice mail.

On another morning, I was settling into my fishing shelter for an angling session. I reached around behind me to retrieve the rod case and felt my boot nudge something, followed by a splash.

I took stock of my equipment but nothing seemed to be missing.

Then, I put down the camera and swiveled it around 360 degrees.

There, on the bottom, lay one of my rod holders.

And out on Madison Lake recently, I had the holes drilled and settled back in the fish house for the morning bite.

As I reached into the pail to pull out my sonar, something slipped off the top of the unit and vanished down the hole in front of me with barely a splash. No rattling off the rim of the hole, it was yet another clean swish.

Checking my pockets, I momentarily wondered what it may have been.

Then I realized it was the multi-tool I should have slipped on to my belt. Instead, I had placed it atop the flasher in the bottom of the pail.

I quickly lowered the camera, hoping to get a glimpse of the $60 tool with the hope of perhaps fishing it back out. Carefully surveying the bottom, I was unable to spot the black nylon sheath. Either it had drifted beyond the range of the camera or more likely, had buried itself in the muck.

In any case, it was a goner.

Drilling a three-pointer should have been so easy.

        

• Click to discuss this story with other readers on our forums.