It’s Funny How the World Works

Years ago, maybe when I was sixteen or seventeen, living in Mississauga, Ontario, I purchased my first fishing rod. I had had a few rods and reels beforehand, all given to me by family and friends. This was my first big purchase that I can remember (I never really had much money to spend growing up). A quantum spinning reel, on sale for $34.99 and a six foot, two piece Shakespeare Uglystick for $39.99. It was a lot of money to me back then, but I had saved up birthday money and I knew what I wanted. My friend Colin Kennedy and I both got equipment that day at Sports Authority, he purchased a Spider brand reel (this was right when they first came out) and I was pretty envious. Together we fished quite a bit. We never really caught anything big, but we caught a lot of fish, and we released them all. One of my fondest memories of him was when we were about eighteen years old and we went with my mother to Bancroft, Ontario and rented a small cottage in the middle of nowhere with no electricity, and we spent our days fishing a secluded lake out of a small canoe with several holes in it. We would fish for twenty minutes then bail water for five, and then fish again. We fished like our lives depended on it, even when it started raining heavily. This was the fishing trip that taught me the magic of the Mepps Black Fury. It caught fish on almost every cast, including some of the biggest rockbass I have seen in my entire life.

Later we started going to fishing shows, and buying more and more equipment; bilding small collections to help us catch more fish. Shortly after, Colin left Ontario and moved west to British Columbia and I haven’t seen him since. I have often wandered how he was if he was still fishing. A few weeks ago I used Google to search his name, I figured it was worth a try, but all I got was an NCAA football player.

Today I got an email from a name I recognized immediately, Colin Kennedy, and with great joy I opened it and read it. It turns out that Colin was looking for some information for a fishing trip and stumbled across a fishing picture that he thought looked like me. He Googled my name and found FishingFury and my personal site. He is still living in British Columbia, but we have made loose plans to get together and fish sometime in the spring.

This is one of the reasons Jon and I do what we do with FishingFury, for our friends and for our family. Fishing has given us some of the happiest moments our lives, and now we are sharing them with the world. It amazes me how common interests help bring people together.