Staying alive. Personal safety is high on my fall fishing list. The water temperature this morning on one of the big lakes I often fish is 51 degrees. Normally dressed, if I fall out of the boat there’s a good chance of death by hypothermia.
When I was about 11 years old my family had a big boat at the beach. On the next dock over there was a smaller boat, about 25 feet long, and one day they went out on a trip to the canyon and never returned. The weather had turned on them, and all the Coast Guard ever found were the fuel bladders they had strapped to the bow, floating 80 miles out.
It was pretty cold up here over the weekend, which naturally got me thinking about places I've fished where it was warm. Florida is one such, of course, where you can toss a plastic worm into some likely shoreline bass cover and come face to face with something like this gator.