A cautionary tale while we're talking about buckets.
I just about broke my damn neck in probably the dumbest fishing accident in all of human history yesterday. I was fishing out of my gheenoe with a 5 gallon bucket sitting on the floor between the middle box and the front casting deck. I mostly had the bucket because I was trying to catch some white bass for dinner, and I had put some tuffy minnows in it to keep them in plenty of water until I could get them to the lake and put them in my flow-trol minnow bucket. However, I also had it along with the thought that I'd use it as a line bucket if I decided to cast the flyrod.
Anyway, it was extremely windy yesterday, with really pushy gusts on and off all the way until dark. So at one point I'd stepped to the back of the boat for something, and I was walking back to the front, basicallly stepping from the back cushion to the middle box and then to the casting deck.
Except I never made it to the casting deck.
As I stepped from the middle box to the deck, a big gust of wind suddenly blew up. It hit the bucket and blew it over at the exact instant I was stepping from the box to the casting deck. The very edge of the bucket caught the front of my right foot, and so instead of stepping to the deck, my foot got caught and slid down into the bucket.
This made my step fall short of where I intended to go, making me fall forward. I tried to step with my left foot but I missed the middle box and my foot landed in the floor of the boat, causing me to fall farther. I tried to pull my right foot out of the bucket and correct my step, but my foot wedged in the bottom of the bucket and it stayed on my leg! This meant that the bottom of the bucket was banging around and kept me from stepping where I wanted to go.
I almost fell over the side, then shifted my weight to stay in the boat, lost my balance from the bucket, spun around, and finally fell forward. I put my hands out to catch myself, but though my left hand broke my fall on the casting deck, my angle meant my right hand missed my gunwale and went in the water. Basically I fell at an angle and whacked the side of my temple on the head of my trolling motor, which was still in the stored "up" position. This put a knot on my head, and the way I landed made the edge of the bucket put a big wide bruise on the inside of my thigh.
At that point, I laid there for a minute running through a list of every cuss word I could think of, while wondering how many of the dozen other boats at the steam plant that day had witnessed my goofy clumsy clodhopping. Then, with just a little difficulty, I un-wedged my foot from the bottom of the bucket, pulled it off, and went back to fishing.
As Mike has said to me before, sometimes fly fishing can be a little frustrating because of all the bullshit that goes along with it, but to me it doesn't matter, because the bullshit follows me whereever I go.
bd
