From 9/6/01</font id=blue>
Have you ever had one of those kind of days when it almost seemed like your fishing trip was just not supposed to happen? No matter which way you turned there was something that was keeping you from actually getting to the water and putting your boat in (wind and weather do not count, because that is pretty much any given weekend around here). This past weekend my wife Margaret and I planned a trip to fish for flounder. Everything was going good, the weather forecast looked good and my mother had volunteered to watch our 9-month old son. This incidentally was the first fishing trip my wife has been on since our son was born, so I really wanted this to be a good trip.
When we woke up on Saturday the sky was dark and it looked like the bottom could fall out any minute. I looked at the forecast (for what it is worth) and there was only a 30% chance of rain. Sometimes I am not really sure if that means there is a 30% chance of rain or that it will rain 30% of the day. You just never really can tell around here. I did not let the clouds discourage me and was determined that our fishing trip was going to go as planned. We packed up our son and headed down to my parents to drop him off and pick up the boat. We stopped along the way to get some mudminnows and the guys at The Reel John’s told me that had been very busy all morning. This made me feel better because if it did rain we would not be the only people getting wet.
We arrived at my parents and Margaret went inside to get our son settled in. I pulled my truck around to hook up the boat. I have a removable trailer ball and the sleeve that slides into the hitch. I looked and it was not there. It has been a while since I trailered anything and normally I remove it and put it in the truck box. I opened up the box, but no trailer hitch. At this point I began to realize that I must have left the sleeve in last time I pulled the boat and now someone had stolen it. I was very disappointed to say the very least. My dad wa