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Instantly my brother and I were in the sights. What had we done? Who had touched the bag? To their defence I was a bit
accident prone in my childhood. Well not so much accident prone as in the wrong place at the most inappropriate time.
Those stories are however for another forum. Where the hell were all our fish?
I still to this day do not understand why what happened next happened. Rather than accept the fish were long gone it was
decided to look for the bag. A rotten old bag. Full of live fish. In the middle of the lake!

To my small intellect the fish would have swam out off the bag once it had broken free of the oar lock. In addition I thought
that the lake bottom would have been fairly out of reach unless you were Jacques-Yves Cousteau. But what would a small
boy know of such things.

So to my brother’s and my horror Dad strips down to undies
and jumps in the lake. There we are in the middle of Budge-
woi Lake with dad in undies bobbing around the boat in a
vain attempt to locate the fish bag. I can’t recall how long
the futile search endured but it seemed like an eternity at
the time. Probably because we weren’t allowed to fish
while Dad was in the water.

Needless to say we never found the bag. And with dad
scaring the fish (as well as two small boys) we did not catch
any more fish either. Aside from the trauma and loss of our
catch, this incident taught me how to be a real fisherman.
It gave me my first experience of telling a story about the
one that got away.