What Happens On A Fishing Trip--Stays On A Fishing Trip...

Much like the marketing slogan of the city of Las Vegas, what happens on a fishing trip...stays on a fishing trip.

And with good reason.

Now, before you let your mind wander to seedy places and envision some sort of steamy Desperate Housewives in waders scene, understand that what I am talking about here, is mainly the transgression of grown men to a state of adolescence.

Of course, what some may call transgression, may actually be a state of bliss for others, and most card carrying males would prefer to remain in the eighth grade anyhoo.Most fishing trip foibles are caused by a slight abuse of alcohol, (O.K. maybe a little more than slight) in deadly combination of serious abuse of the legume.Most women would be surprised to find that men are such patrons of the arts, commonly re-enacting the scene from the movie Blazing Saddles worldwide.

Doctors, judges, CEO's, and other well respected pillars of society would certainly quake in their boots if information got out on the sophomoric pranks that take place on fishing trips. Again, most are innocent and consist of "gross smells", waking up in odd places, grabbing odd places, the misuse of personal property and carefully placed fish heads and carcasses.

All that being said, a few years back, my good friend Ovis and I were on a fishing trip and decided to let our wives in on the secret world of the fishing road trip.

Big mistake.

We didn't actually invite them on the trip, which would have been cause for immediate termination of our man cards, but we did get the hairbrained idea of filming segments of our trip so they too could see what FUN we were having. In fact, we may have unwittingly created the first reality TV show since this filming took place well before Survivor or The Nanny were even gleams in their producers eyes.

The results are still way to painful to watch.

Let me explain.

We shot some nice footage of us flyfishing on the famed Blackfoot River in Montana, which if you are familiar with the movie A River Runs Through It, is the same river they used to popularize and immortalize the grand sport of flyfishing. Our footage, of course, set the flyfishing world backwards about 10,000 years, and even the best film editor would have been challenged to find 2 minutes of usable film. Perhaps, had we stopped at this point our wives would have said something like "nice scenery, do you guys actually catch fish?", and we could have saved face as only being lousy flyfishermen.

This was not the case.

After a sandwich and a cold beverage, we decided a couple games of Cribbage were in order, before we went out for our afternoon casting session. At some point during the Cribbage game, while we sat partaking of some "potent iced juice and whatever" concoction, one of us came up with the bright idea to film our card game. This decision was made based on the assumption that we were really quite witty and were getting funnier as the card game progressed. In fact, we were so sure of this, that we decided to include the footage in our reality fishing show. We were just cracking ourselves up,and as we dead-panned for the video camera, which now sat atop a tripod, we just knew the writers of Seinfeld would be contacting us to join their writing team soon. We even played back some footage just to make sure we were funny--and you know what?-- under the influence of "potent iced juice and whatever"..... we were!

A full half hour of non- stop cribbage action. "Whoa, that's a double run and knobs for 9".

Funny stuff.And they think Texas Hold 'em is a made for TV game!

Upon our trip home, we informed our wives we were about to let them in on the secret world of the male fishing trip. Somewhat of a risk, but it was time that we let our wives know just how much fun they were missing by getting the wrong mix of chromosomes.

Sort of a gloating session, I guess.

The evening was set, we had some dinner, a beverage or two, and kept teasing our wives with some material from what was sure to be the best fishing film....ever!! They didn't seem to get our unique and dry sense of humor, but some guys are just funnier on TV, and what would you expect from the Y-chromosomally challenged anyway?

So we moved to the sofa, plugged in the videotape, and prepared to watch our wives roll in laughter, as they realized they were really married to Eddie Murphy and Steve Martin.

Somebody must have switched tapes on us.

For the next 45 minutes we watched what looked to be a training film, for the sobriety tank at the county jail. Oh, the fishing footage was OK- if you like watching two middle aged men NOT catch fish and then get excited over the landing of a lunker 7 inch trout. But when the "cribbage show" came on the air, our wives simply sat there blinking slowly as their jaws dropped open into what may be the world's record for the longest period of jawdropping blank stares.

If they have a record for that sort of thing.

Truth be told, we would have had to have consumed an equal amount of "potent iced juice and whatever" to even remotely have found the footage funny. We tried to use the excuse" I guess you had to be there."But evidently we weren't there at the time ourselves!!

So, the secret of what happens on a fishing trip, stays on a fishing trip, will forever be protected and be our guiding mantra from this point forward. For there are some things our wives just don't need to know about...

...Like their husbands never got out of the eighth grade!!