You know you are really fishing when you come home all scratched up.
I fish most of the time in a private lake between two neighborhoods. It is the middle in a string of three lakes. And it is the only one of the three I have fished. The one above it is very small, and is located behind an apartment complex. And the one below it is huge and located on about 3 apartment complexes, 2 neighborhoods and one of the busiest roads in town.
At the eastern end of the lake is a fork. As you can see in this picture, 
it looks like a peninsula that reaches out into the shallow end of the lake. The guy I fish with, Jack, always calls it an island, and says that he has been all the way around it before, but I never quite believed him. We usually fish as far as we can go into the shallower of the forks, and it is one of our most productive parts of the lake. The other fork is much deeper, partly. It is much deeper in a channel about as wide as the boat. The rest of that fork is about a foot deep. That channel is the main channel feeding the lake. For some reason, Friday I said, “Why don’t we go under the bridge and see if we can get to the spillway of the next lake.” (That would be the upstream lake. The one on the left in the picture.) We didn’t know if we could make it, but it seemed worth a try, so we headed out. Immediately I learned a lesson. It is, in fact, an island. 
Here you can see the water on the back side.
So we proceeded under the bridge, we didn’t know which side to go up, and I was afraid of it having a concrete bottom, but we chose the right and headed out. 
I was surprised that there were no bats under there, also that it was so easy to get through. There was one limb in the path, but we could put up the trolling motor and paddle past with no trouble. When we came out the other side I could see we chose the right side, because the other had a beaver dam blocking the entrance.
Also after we came through the bridge we were navigating a stream only about as wide as the boat. We moved along with the paddle and by pulling on low hanging branches. It forked several times, but we always took the path that seemed deepest. We were just getting the hang of it, when we were blocked, unable to make it to the spillway in the boat. We came to a place where we could see the spillway probably 50 yards in the distance, but we were blocked by a beaver dam. Stupid beavers. 
We thought since we’ve come this far, we should get out and see if we can walk to the spillway. It was strange, I sort of felt like a 12 year old out “exploring” in the woods. Also I learned a lesson, though it is a lot lighter it is much harder to walk through the woods with a fishing pole than a gun. It’s longer and gets tangled on every stupid branch. So we tried working our way up the stream then had to turn back. We tried to go around the thicket but were swamped in by all the forks in the creek we didn’t take the first time.
It turns out, we went all that way for nothing. Then we had to figure out something that hadn’t occurred to us before. How do we turn the boat around? After taking the trolling motor off, and putting Jack in the boat, (to float up the front) I was able to stay on the bank and swing it around. Then I managed to get back in without falling in the water, and we paddled back. Back under the bridge, 
and into familiar home water. We caught nothing, but it was an interesting little adventure. So I thought I’d share it. 
Despite that detour, I had a good day fishing. I caught 2 bass and 2 jacks (pike) and I had a third bass hooked. In fact I had 2 fish on in my first 10 casts of the morning. (a topwater chugger with a 3 foot trailer) But I had to fight about 25 backlashes trying to throw that rig.
This post was kind of a rambling mess. Thanks for reading.
This is not a fake picture, this is Jake Johnson my nephew. he really looks like a cabbage patch doll. Also I'm sporting the half-face tan and looking oddly bald. (I'm puffing out my cheeks to look like him.)
