Advanced Muppetry

My knee is itching as I sit here.

It’s a good thing because just a couple of weeks back, it was split open and pouring blood after an altercation with the Omaha boat ramp.

It woke me up at about 4 this morning, itching like crazy and the idea for this column came to me – it’s time for a confessional of advanced muppetry. If you do dumb things on a boat, you’re being a muppet. Really dumb things are known as advanced muppetry – but in most cases, divine intervention is the cause. The female deity.

First let me state that in my view, God is a man. Think about it – if God was a woman, would the world be the place it is? No. I rest my case.

Fate however, is a woman. A sort of assistant to God - the Chief Operating Officer. And of course Fate has the twisted logic and humour of a female. She sits up there feeling a bit bored. Spies Kelly getting his boat ready.

As the rods go aboard she calls to her assistant – make it blow hard she cries.

The poor assistant has to remind her that the windy machine’s a bit tired after she’s thrashed it for weeks to keep fishermen off the water

She thinks a while and requests of another assistant to make sure the boat ramp is extra slippery.

“I need some fun and that fat old bugger is usually good for a laugh,” she chuckles, evilly.

Which is how I came to launch the boat with no one hanging on to the bow rope, arsed over on the ramp and had to swim out into the estuary to retrieve the boat. Still went fishing – spent all afternoon in soaked clothes and dripping blood from a gashed knee. I can only be thankful that Fate’s “make the water freeze” machine was also on the blink.

I’m pretty sure that qualifies as advanced muppetry. There are more, unfortunately.

My most infamous – certainly the most dangerous - came not far from the same boat ramp. I had a small Allicraft, it was Boxing Day and after three days of being nice to all the family I needed to get out for a fish.

As I blatted out of the estuary a substantial rock miraculously appeared right in front of me and microseconds later I hit it going full noise. With a hell of a crash the boat leaped skywards and landed on the other side of the rock. The mud hit the cotton. After removing my bicycle clips to let the mess out of my pants I wondered how come I wasn’t dead. Or standing in the water up to my knees already. But no, apart from the massive dent in the bow everything was still OK. As me old sailing skipper used to say though … you could have cut washers off me ringpiece.

Less dramatic than that, but an equally memorable piece of advanced muppetry was that hoary old launching problem – the forgotten bung. Fate has sent that one down a few times but the most memorable was taking the family out for a midwinter fish – on that occasion leaving the bung meant a frantic mid winter swim. It is impossible, to put the bung in a floating Ramco 560 without swimming under it. And of course you can’t hang round because that little hole can deliver enough water to sink the Titanic in short order. Tell you what – it would have been impossible for me to father any more little Kellys that day.

That was nothing compared with taking a head first dive out of a 12 foot tin boat into Lake Aniwhenua when flyfishing. The balance is tricky and somehow I got it all wrong.

My caring mate, before he’d pull me from the frozen water - made me pass his expensive flyrod up to him … and I came awful close to providing the lake’s eels with a feed of frozen cobblers.

I won’t get into the advanced muppetry of mates, but there is one exception. The one who towed my boat up north. He never quite got the hang of the trailer turning inside the tow vehicle and the resulting repairs to nearly every right-hand road sign between Auckland and Houhora probably cost Northland its annual roading budget. Normally this bloke drives like a well behaved 70 year old. Put a boat on the back and suddenly he’s trying to win the V8 Supercar Championships. He’s all over the road, way over the speed limit, doing brake lockups into corners and more. I have quietly excused myself from driving with him when there is anything with a pointy end attached to the back of his car.

Fishing tackle hasn’t escaped either with a fair few busted things, gear dropped over the side and the like.

But the prime piece of muppetry was striking hard, winding hard then striking again, hard enough to pull the teeth out of any fish known to mankind – only to lose the rod out of my hands and watch it disappear under the water like a missile as the mono nylon returned to its normal length. I recall sitting their open mouthed in astonishment, looking at the torpedo-like trail of bubbles down into the depths.

The end of a perfectly good Composite Developments rod!

I’m sure I could hear a female cackle emanating from on high that day, as I had before. And no doubt, will again…..