Thread: Put Your Pride Aside And Wear The Lifevest When Fishing Alone

Only comment to Ranger's post I have would be to remove the "fishing alone" comment. I wear mine all the time, alone or not. If you go in and get pulled under by the weight of heavy clothes, there is not much a guy in the boat can do to help you. I still can't get any of my friends to wear one, they look at me like I am a Martian and we are all in our 60s and 70s. So much for getting smarter as you get older.

Great post Ranger. Me and a friend lived to tell about it back when we were younger, but we were really lucky. We were fishing a bass tournament in late February on lake Eucha, water temp was 40 degrees. Tough part was, i sunk my boat because i made a stupid mistake. I turned the boat too sharp and took a huge wave over the back of the boat. The boat literally sunk within 30 seconds. No, me and my buddy weren't wearing our life jackets. You know, we were in our 20's and we were bulletproof. We both panicked of course. We grabbed the life jackets as the boat sunk out from under us in the mouth of a big cove 200 yards from shore. We managed to get the life jackets on, but it wasn't easy with all the heavy winter clothes and boots we had on. What really saved us was an ice chest we were using for a live well. We both managed to swim to it and both of us used the handle on each side to hold onto. My buddies first instinct was to try to swim to shore. i insisted that he stay with me, holding onto the ice chest. We hung onto that ice chest for over 30 minutes, hollering as loud as we could trying to get someones attention. Some lady on the other side of the lake finally heard us and told the lake ranger where we were at. When he finally pulled his boat up along side us we were both almost unconscious and couldn't even grab onto the side of his boat. Luckily he was a big fella and he literally pulled both of us into his boat by the hair on our head. i'll never forget how quickly the water affected our ability to move or even think. Within 10 to 15 minutes we were done. We were shivering uncontrollably and struggled to just hold onto the ice chest. I remember all the the things that ran through my mind while we were out there for so long. One of the things that bothered me the most was my stupid mistake would cause my buddy to lose his life. For sure, we wouldn't be alive today if we hadn't been able to get those life jackets on. Don't mess around guys, wear your life jacket, #$@! happens.