It’s been an interesting few months this summer. Once school let out for the summer, I spent the first month just relaxing not really doing much but working and fishing. It was nice, but since then I’ve had a really hard time settling into any kind of groove or routine in my life. Hence the lack of activity on both my website and Facebook fan page. In the summer, we typically see a drop in tournament activity with the exception of small club tournaments and short weeknight tournaments. I’ve fished a few here and there, but haven’t taken them very seriously. Mostly just out there fishing for the fun of it and fishing with guys I normally wouldn’t fish tournaments with. Guys who could really maybe just use a fun evening/day out on the water catching fish. Well, the last 2-3 weeks, I finally feel like I’ve gradually been getting into more of a routine and getting myself organized again after a good summer break. Time to climb back on the horse with my fishing, keeping updated, organized, and focussed. I’ve also spent quite a bit of time this summer with my new boat, ‘Merica, and getting her in the shape I want her in for taking tournaments seriously. She’s about there. Just a few more tweaks I think.
Anyways, I wanted to tell ya’ll about an interesting series of events the past couple of months, which include me, Lake Austin, and dead bodies. Sounds like fun huh? So about a month and a half ago, I had fished a TTZ Wednesday Nighter, and was hanging out under the 360 bridge afterwards just BSing with a bunch of guys under the bridge around 11 PM. Well, as we’re there in the parking lot, two police boats come up the lake with their sirens on and stop right under the bridge. They then begin searching with spotlights all along the cliff on the opposite shoreline and in the water. We started thinking that maybe someone had jumped off the bridge and they were looking for a body. Shortly thereafter, an ambulance makes its way into the parking lot also with its sirens on. We soon found out that “someone may have fallen off the cliff” on the opposite shoreline. They searched for a good 30 minutes with no luck. I ended up leaving before they ever found anyone, but I don’t think they ever did find anyone.
One week later, I found myself fishing the Wednesday Nighter again. This time, on my way back to the ramp in the darkness, I hit something floating in the water (never saw it). I heard it bump the boat and knock the motor, but it didn’t sound or feel like anything major and the motor ran fine the rest of the way back to the ramp. Didn’t think much of it. The next time on the water a few days later, however, I noticed the boat was wobbling a bit at higher speeds, and a couple of times after running the motor, there was a big fuel/oil slick on the surface of the water around the motor. I took it in to Tracker Marine and they said that the prop shaft was bent and that it was leaking oil pretty bad. Odd. Typically you have to hit something pretty hard to bend that prop shaft, and I don’t think what I hit was hard enough to do that. Personally, I think its been bent since I bought the boat, but whatever. After telling my manager at work about the story, he joked and said, “Maybe you hit that body they were looking for last week.”
Fast forwards to two days ago. After a day of running errands on Monday, I decided to hit up Lake Austin for a quick evening session. I arrived at the Quinlan Park boat ramp at 5:30 PM to find a small news crew from YNN there. As I was getting my boat ready to launch, they came up to me and asked, “Hey, do you feel like this ramp is less safe than the other ramps on the lake?” I responded with, “Uhhhhh, no, not really. It’s pretty much the same. I guess it’s a little steeper and a littler harder to get out sometimes, but that’s about it.” To which the interviewer said, “Because someone just died here this morning.” Anyways, he then proceeds to tell me that earlier that morning there was a submerged car and a body found in the water on the ramp. He spent the next while asking me several leading questions to get me to talk about how unsafe the ramp was and did a brief interview with me. I could tell that they were going to edit my responses to get the news story they wanted, but I was quite surprised when I Googled to read the story the next morning:
http://austin.ynn.com/content/news/294870/quinlan-park-death-raises-safety-concerns
HA! They totally reported me as being the guy who found the car and body that morning at 7 AM! Pretty awesome. Just goes to show how bogus the news is. I showed up at the ramp more than 10 hours after the incident occurred. I saw no submerged car, and no dead body. I find all of this quite hilarious. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to watch the video clip yet because I don’t have Time Warner Cable and apparently Time Warner has some deal with YNN. If someone with Time Warner can manage to post the video on YouTube, I’d greatly appreciate it. 🙂
Good thing you called 911 🙂