Welcome to Gaia! ::

It was early in the morning when my girlfriends and I went out onto the docks of Lak Wannapuke at the camp, and a pale mist floated harmlessly over the surface of the murky lake water. Chattering excitedly over the day to come, the seven of us unpacked our tackle boxes and prepared our fishing rods. Casting out into the lake, we set our rods up on their stands and watched for the tugs on the lines from our fishy pray. Minutes turned into hours as we sat there, gossip spreading between us like wild fire as we payed more attenion to each other than we did to our fishing.

As the sun rose high into the air, the mist on the lake cleared, and Steph stood up. "Hey, lets take a picture together! Here, everyone group together and I'll take it." Squished together, we all grinned and shouted out 'cheese' at the top of our lungs. The camera clicked and we all ran over to see the image on the desplay screan. To our befudlement, there was a hand in the water behind us.

"That wan't there when I took the picture" Steph murmered, breaking the silence. "Should we... maybe try it again?" The rest of us nodded and laughed it off nervously. Maybe this hand was just a peice of wood or something.

The camera clicked again, but once again we saw the hand when the image displayed.

"Maybe it's trying to tell us something. Maybe it's from a ghost!" Katie squeeked out, looking a bit pale in the face.

Gulping, I stepped foreward. "I'll go and dive under the water. Maybe I'll find something." Trembling, I ran off back to camp to get my snorkle and mask, and the next thing I could remember, I was jumping into that fridged lake water. It was hard to see anything through the murk, but for some bizzar reason I could clearly make out the hand as it floated below me through the water. Swimming after it, I found myself closer to the bottom of the lake, and the hand was no where to be found. Instead, there was this wooden crate resting in the sediment.

Kicking as hard as I could, I surfaced and brought the crate to shore. "I found this down there." I said breathlessly, explaining how the hand had shown up and guided me. Circling around the crate, the rest of the girls waited for me to open it up. Biting my lip, I lifted the top up and inside was...

...All the bologna I've been feeding you!

This story is true. (Ever notice how most fishing tales start with that?)

A little bit of background first: I live in Florida on the Gulf of Mexico. Canals are everywhere in my town. So I used to roam up and down my neighborhood with my co-conspirator, a classmate named Jason and we'd park ourselves in empty lots and fish off the seawalls or docks. A heavy duty rake let us pry oysters off the walls to use as bait. Best entertainment I never had to spend money on. <3

So anyways, Jason and myself were fishing off my dock when we caught a medium size sheepshead. Sheepshead, if you haven't had the chance of meeting one, have creepy a** teeth. And try as we might, neither of us could get the hook out of this fish, mostly for fear of the teeth. So, we trot up from the dock, with the pole and the fish still on it, to find my dad on a float in the pool. We explain our situation and he grabs the fish and yanks it off the hook. The fish clearly objected to the process and started to flop, My dad tried to keep his grip but over balanced, and yep, over went my dad and down went the fish. Into the pool.

So Jason ran back to his place to try and grab a net, while my only option was to put more bait on the hook and try to get the fish out the only way I knew how. XD; We did eventually chase the fish into the net, because he wasn't having any of that bait. Slightly worse for wear, we tossed him back into the canal, and wished him well. If anyone deserved to live after that, it was him.