Last day at Ho Hum (Sun.)

We had planned on fishing this morning, but it stormed during the night, and we got up to pretty strong winds, white caps on the water, so we decided to do our chores instead.  After a quick trip into town for Joe's morning caffeine (diet Coke), we got the laundry and vacuuming done and settled in to watch the NASCAR race.  I kept an eye on the fishing pier but no one else seemed inclined to fight the wind either.  The one kid (Brian) who was throwing his net last night, and who fished with us yesterday, was out for a while this morning, but he did more casting of his net off the pier than he did fishing.

We continued to learn more about this area.  There's a lot of WWII history here, this is where the troops trained for the Normandy Invasion.  I guess there's a book, Sunshine Beach, about that (it's fiction but would probably be good to read).  The campground host said it's out of print now, though, and only available through Kindle books.  Something to check into.

After the race, we decided to walk out to the pier and check out the weather.  We decided it wasn't quite as windy, so I thought we should try fishing one more time.  So we walked back to the RV and gathered up our poles and tackle, and back to the pier we went.  I had to catch some bait fish first, but Joe started out with our day-old frozen shrimp and got to pretty good hits right away.  It took me a while to get any bait fish, and I dropped the first one I had, but I finally got us some, and I started fishing too. 

So here's Joe and me seriously fishing.  And you can see how far away the RV is from the fishing pier in the second picture.

 Joe decided to live dangerously here and see if he could fall off the rail. 

Here's my bucket of bait fish.  We were trying to fish with live bait, but if the fish died in the bucket, we would cut the head and tail off and use it for "cut bait."  But nothing seemed to work for me.  All I caught was the bait fish.

But for Joe, things got exciting.  He hooked into something that just took his line straight out.  It didn't take long for him to figure out it was another stingray.  He fought it from one end of the fishing pier to the other, going over my line, and then over to the side. He would gain a little line, then the fish would just take straight off again.

Our new friend, Brian, was out in the water with his net, so he yelled for Joe to bring him toward him and he would try to throw his net over him.  Well, Joe really wasn't the one deciding where that fish was going -- it was going exactly where it wanted to go.  But it did go around the end of the fishing pier, and over by the boardwalk.  Brian was on the other side of the boardwalk.  So Joe tried to steer the fish that way, then the fish went under the boardwalk.  Brian waded under the boardwalk and took Joe's pole from him, then tried to reel the fish in.  It did come to the top a couple of times, and we could see it was a really large stingray, probably in the 50-lb range.  Brian wasn't winning the battle with the fish either, so he gave Joe his pole back, I went down the boardwalk and got Brian's net and threw it to him, and he tried to throw the net over the fish.

Brian finally got the net thrown over the stingray and we all headed toward shore.  But when we got in, we discovered that the fish had escaped the net, with the hook, and Joe had an empty pole.  Quite disappointing, but it was exciting for a while.  We had a little audience watching all this.

We fished for another hour or so but didn't have any luck, so we gave it up, came in and had a late dinner, and Joe defrosted the refrigerator.  He was beat after his big battle with "the one that got away."  But we have new fish tales to tell.


We've enjoyed our time here, pretty restful and it's always nice to be around the water.  Tomorrow we head to Georgia.