Every fisherman has a bad-trip story. A blown lower unit. A dead battery. A forgotten tackle box. A front that turns a sure thing into a skunking.

Then there are the trips that go so completely sideways they quit being aggravating and become unforgettable.

This is one of those.

Last spring, during my two-week off-limits period before the Texas Invitational at Sam Rayburn, I was guiding every day on Lake Conroe. I had been counting down the days until the tournament while running bass trip after bass trip, sometimes two half-days, sometimes one full day, every day leading up to tournament week. I had guide trips booked straight through the Sunday before official practice began on Monday.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I made a mistake.

I got so wrapped up in taking care of business and getting ready to head to Rayburn that I completely forgot about a guide trip I had booked for Sunday afternoon. I knew about my Sunday morning trip and never bothered to check the schedule because I already knew when and where I needed to be for that one. The afternoon trip, though, had been booked a week or so earlier, and while I had every intention of running it, it slipped right out of my head.

The customer was a regular of mine. When we worked out the details, he told me he would be staying at April Plaza Marina over the weekend in one of their rooms on the water. It was about a thirty-minute drive from April Plaza to the marina up the lake where I normally launched. Even though picking him up by water was ten miles out of my way, I offered to do it as a courtesy and drop him back there afterward.

It was meant as a favor.

Instead, it set the stage for disaster.

Running that Sunday afternoon trip was already going to put me arriving late that night at Shane Allman’s place on Rayburn, where I was staying for tournament week. But I figured I could tough it out. A fishing guide and tournament pro can always use the extra money.

Now that you know the setup, I will tell it the way it happened.

I had just finished my morning trip and put the boat back on the trailer. My bags were already packed in the truck, and I was rolling north on I-45, headed toward Huntsville to catch Highway 190 over to Jasper. About thirty minutes into the drive, it hit me like a brick.

I had a guide trip booked for that afternoon.

I pulled over, grabbed my schedule, and looked. I was supposed to be at April Plaza Marina at 12:30, and it was already about 1:00. I called the marina and asked if anyone was there looking for me. The lady told me there had been a couple of fellows waiting, that they were not real happy with me, and that they had already left.

I then called the number I had written down for the customer, hoping at least to leave a message.

Fax machine.

I knew I had called that number before, so I sat there wondering what in the world was going on. I tried again. Same thing. At that point, there was nothing left to do but keep driving to Rayburn and wait for the storm to come back around later.

What really got me was this: they had not been waiting for me at my regular marina when I came in from my morning trip, because I had told them I would pick them up down the lake. I was trying to be accommodating, but it cost me. Had I simply told them to meet me at my marina like usual, this never would have happened.

I got to Shane’s place and tried the number again.

Fax machine.

So I figured I would just have to wait for them to call my house and leave a message asking where in the devil I had been and why I had never shown up to take them fishing.

On Tuesday night, I called home and checked the answering machine. Sure enough, they had left a message. It was polite, all things considered. They simply wondered why I had not shown up and left their number.

I called them right then.

My customer answered, and I introduced myself. Then came the explanation. I told him I had completely forgotten the trip, that I had called the marina but they had already left, and that I had tried to call his house but kept getting a fax machine.

He told me they had accidentally left the fax on instead of the answering machine.

As bad as I felt, he sounded as though he might forgive me. I told him I wanted to make it right and offered to take him fishing for free on another day.

That is where the story really begins.

A few weeks later, when I finally took them on that free trip, they told me what had happened over the course of that weekend. And when they finished, I realized my forgetting the trip had only been one chapter in a much larger disaster.

It started Friday.

He and his friend had come up to the lake with their own boat, checked into their room, and decided they would go out on the town that evening. They called a limousine service and arranged for a 9:00 p.m. pickup at their motel.

By 10:30, they were still standing there waiting.

They called. They waited some more. No limousine.

At around 11:00, they finally gave up and went to bed.

The next morning, they went fishing and had a decent trip. They caught a few fish and came back in to rest before heading out again that afternoon. Later that day they caught a nice bass, around seven pounds, and wanted to take a picture of it. The problem was, the camera was in the truck. They came back to the marina, slipped the boat into its wet stall, and left the livewells running so the fish would stay alive overnight. They figured they would take the picture the next morning in good light.

The next morning, they climbed into the boat and pushed off from the dock.

While they were getting rods and tackle ready, the wind eased them farther out into the lake. They went to start the outboard and discovered the battery was dead from running the livewells all night. They dropped the trolling motor, but it would not work either. They tried paddling, but the wind was too strong.

Eventually, they flagged down another boat and got a jump-start.

They fired up, put the boat on pad, and ran back to the marina to charge the battery and look at the trolling motor. They went to the truck for tools, only to remember that the keys were in a jacket they had left in the boat. They looked for the jacket, but somewhere during the run back it had blown out.

Now the keys were gone too.

This was Sunday morning, around 8:00 a.m., not exactly prime time for finding a locksmith. But eventually they located one, and for eighty-five dollars he opened the truck and made an ignition key.

Next they got the battery charging and tinkered with the trolling motor until they had it working again. At that point they decided to write off the morning and just wait for me to show up at 12:30 to take them fishing.

At about 12:15, they walked out on the dock to wait where I had told them I would pick them up.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited some more.

But I never showed.

They asked the marina operator if she knew where I was, but she had no idea. Finally, having reached the understandable conclusion that I was, in their words, pretty much a you-know-what, they decided to go fishing in their own boat.

They ran way up the lake to fish some riprap. One of them was on the trolling motor and the other was digging through the tackle box for the right lure. The trolling motor was still not running properly, and the wind started pushing them straight toward the rocks. The man on the bow jumped back behind the wheel, cranked the big motor, and hit it hard to avoid smashing into the bank.

At that exact moment, the other fellow fell into the tackle box and buried a treble hook in his hand, past the barb on two of the three points.

Now things had gotten truly western.

They pulled into a nearby marina and looked for help. One fellow tried the old string trick to yank the hooks out, but they were buried too deep. So they tied the boat up, got a ride to the medical center in Conroe, and for $375 the emergency room removed the hooks and sent them on their way.

Then they got a ride back to April Plaza, where their truck and trailer were parked, packed up their gear, and drove all the way around to the north end of the lake to retrieve the boat. They finally got it on the trailer and made it back to Houston around midnight that Sunday night.

When they finished telling me all this, we all had to laugh. By then it had passed beyond aggravation and crossed fully into legend. As far as fishing mishaps go, I do not believe I have ever heard one that could top it.

And somehow, after missed appointments, dead batteries, broken trolling motors, lost keys, no-shows, emergency-room bills, and midnight returns home, they were still willing to come fishing again.

That says about all you need to know about fishermen.

A man once said, “Once a fisherman, always a fisherman.”

After hearing that story, I believe it more than ever.