Rick and I arrived at the launch before the sun had even decided it was time to get out of bed. It was still dark enough that I had to use my little pin light to load the kayak.

It was around 55 degrees, which is pretty darn cool for me. I know there are people who think 55 degrees is perfect fishing weather, but I’m not one of those people. My problem with wearing a jacket is that I know what’s going to happen. The temperature will eventually climb high enough that I’ll want to take it off, and then I have to find somewhere to store it.

Kayak storage is a precious commodity. There’s only so much room for fishing rods, tackle, food, drinks, and all the other stuff I have convinced myself I absolutely need.

So, I decided to take my jacket off and put it back in my truck. Unfortunately, I had already put my truck keys in my dry bag.

That put a little wrinkle in my plan.

I decided to just put the jacket behind my seat and deal with it later.

Rick wanted to paddle about a mile and a half downstream to what we call the “second waterfall” to start his fishing expedition. It’s one of two spillways that drain from a settling pond created by the coal mining company that owns the land.

I had a different plan.

I wanted to fish on the other side of the bridge near the launch site because I had a brand-new topwater lure I was anxious to try.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I had changed all of my fishing lines to braided line with a five-to-seven-foot fluorocarbon leader. I use a double Uni knot to join the two different lines together.

The double Uni knot works great on a spinning reel because the eyelets on those rods are fairly large. Unfortunately, baitcasting rods have much smaller eyelets, and the knot has a tendency to get hung up when it passes through them.

My new topwater lure was attached to one of my baitcasting reels.

On my very first cast, I noticed the knot hitting the eyelet at the end of the rod. I immediately thought, “This could become a problem.”

Then, on that same first cast, a fish boiled up at the lure but didn’t actually take it.

My heart jumped.

Fish on the first cast? Well, sort of.

I cast back toward the same general area, hoping I could convince the fish to give me another chance. The sound of my lure hitting the water just inches from my kayak told me something had gone terribly wrong.

I knew immediately what had happened.

The reel had backlashed.

And not just a little.

I had created a bird’s nest that probably could have provided shelter for an entire family of birds.

I took the topwater lure off that rod and grabbed another baitcasting combo. I swapped the lure over and made another cast.

When I reeled it in, something didn’t feel right. It was unusually difficult to turn the handle. I made a few adjustments to the drag and cast the lure back out.

Almost immediately, a fish came flying out of the water and grabbed it.

Finally!

I set the hook and started reeling.

Except the more I turned the handle, the harder it became to turn.

Within a couple of seconds, the reel completely stopped working.

Apparently, my fishing equipment had decided it was going to participate in the adventure too.

I laid the rod down in the kayak, grabbed the fishing line with my hands and started pulling the fish in manually.

I could tell it was a good-sized fish because every time it dove toward deeper water, the line dug into my hands.

Eventually, I got the fish close enough to see it.

That’s when I noticed something else.

The lure wasn’t in the fish’s mouth.

It was hooked in the side of the fish just beyond the gills.

I managed to get the fish close enough to lip it, pulled it into the kayak and removed the hook.

The fish weighed nearly three pounds.

I was pretty happy about that.

After releasing the fish, I changed out the broken baitcasting reel for a spare and put the topwater lure on it.

The very next cast, another fish grabbed the lure.

It jumped completely out of the water, apparently just to make sure I knew it had been hooked.

At that point, I was thinking this might turn into one of those days where I caught a multitude of fish.

That didn’t happen.

That was the last fish I caught on the topwater lure.

I ended the day with three fish total—two on the topwater lure and one on a plastic worm.

The wind eventually picked up, making it difficult to keep the kayak in one place. Anyone who has fished from a kayak knows that once the wind gets strong enough, you stop fishing and start operating a very inefficient watercraft.

I fished until nearly 11:00 a.m. and then started making my way back toward the launch.

I arrived around 11:45 and beached the kayak. As I was getting into my truck to start loading everything, I saw Rick paddle his way toward the launch.

He told me he had caught seven or eight fish.

Seven or eight.

I had caught three.

And the really irritating part was that Rick hadn’t spent the morning fighting backlashes, replacing reels, or wrestling with fishing equipment that appeared to be plotting against him.

I was a little jealous, to say the least.

But the excitement wasn’t over.

Not even close.

I use a simple paracord latching system to secure my kayak to my truck. I hook one end to one side of the truck, run the cord through the handle on one side of the kayak, pull it over my fishing rods, run it through the handle on the other side and connect it to the other side of the truck. Then I cinch everything down tight.

I’ve used this system for years and never had a problem.

Until this day.

About halfway home, I heard a loud thump.

I immediately looked in the rearview mirror.

I didn’t see my camera pole.

My first thought was that it had somehow come loose and fallen off the truck.

I pulled over in someone’s yard and jumped out to see what was going on.

That’s when I discovered something slightly more important than my missing camera pole.

My kayak was gone too.

The thump I had heard wasn’t my camera pole hitting the road.

It was my kayak bouncing off the bed of my truck and landing on the pavement.

Apparently, my kayak had decided it had enough of being transported and wanted to see the world on its own.

I jumped back into the truck, looked around to make sure nobody was coming and quickly turned around.

It didn’t take long to find my kayak.

It was partly in the middle of the road and partly in someone’s front yard.

I pulled over across the road, got out and immediately noticed something else.

My fishing rods were nowhere to be found.

They had apparently decided to go on their own adventure too.

I grabbed the kayak, dragged it across the road and managed to get it loaded back onto the truck.

I turned on my emergency flashers and started walking down the road looking for my missing equipment.

Eventually, I found all five of my rods scattered along the side of the road.

I was extremely lucky.

There was no one directly behind me when the kayak decided to disembark.

Had someone been following closely, this story could have ended with me explaining to an insurance company why my kayak decided to attack somebody’s vehicle.

When I got home, I unloaded everything from the kayak so I could turn it over and inspect the damage.

Other than some scuff marks where it had hit the pavement, the kayak actually looked to be in pretty good shape.

Of the five rods that went flying, two sustained some damage to the eyelets. I’ll have to make some adjustments to them before I can use those rods again.

After looking over the tie-down system, I think I figured out what happened.

When I pulled the paracord tight, the knot apparently worked its way through the cam. Once that happened, the rope loosened and the kayak was free to make its great escape.

I’ve made what I hope is a simple correction.

I’ve added a second knot to the line so that if the first knot somehow works its way through the cam again, the second knot will catch it.

At least that’s how it works in theory.

And as I’ve learned from this particular fishing trip, theory and actual fishing don’t always have a lot in common.

I went fishing expecting to catch some fish.

Instead, I caught three fish, broke a reel, created a bird’s nest, damaged two fishing rods and watched my kayak take itself for a ride down the highway.

Rick caught seven or eight fish.

I’m pretty sure he had the better day.

But I did get home with my kayak.

So I guess there’s that.