I watched my wife as she crouched under the work table in the garage and began pulling out bunches of bags that contained miscellaneous stuff she accumulated over the past few years. I had that little tickle of caution bugging me, thinking that this was not a very good idea. But I had to put my collection of wading shoes away and as I grabbed a pair of Simms Rivershed boots off the floor her screaming began.
*****
Paul invited me to fish with him for
spring striped bass on the Potomac River. I arrived late
Thursday night at his place on Cobb Island and quickly unloaded the car and
grabbed some sleep. He said not to worry about waking up
too early in the morning but I was up by 7am. From the
weather reports the previous day I knew the morning was
going to start out cold and gradually warm up until the
temperature hit the mid-80's. I brought my 3-layer
waders along to keep warm in the boat's open cockpit but
as I placed my foot into the right bootie and my toes
hit a soft lump. I pulled my leg out and reached into
the wader and pulled out two huge gobs of soft shredded
paper. This pile of paper looked familiar to me and to
be truthful, part of me was denying what it really was
and the other half was saying, "Yes you idiot, it's
exactly what you think it is." I looked closely at the
paper and it had been chewed into tiny pieces. A mouse
nest.
A few months ago I was changing the
interior HEPA filter my car's air conditioning system
and when I opened the filer compartment a pile of
shredded paper that looked exactly like what I was now
holding in my hands came tumbling out. Because we had
such a brutal winter a mouse had probably crawled into
the engine air duct, which had no screen on it, and
began building a nest on the nice soft filter using
some napkins I kept in the glove box. Gross. At least
there were no baby mice on it. I cleaned everything
out using Clorox and Lysol and replaced the filter.
However I also decided to check my wife's car and
found the same thing--another nest under construction.
This led to more cleaning and a new filter for her
vehicle.
But how did the mouse get into and out of my waders? I hang
my waders up after use and I had just used them last week
when I fished with Jin for shad on the Potomac River at Fletcher's Boat
House. There
was no mouse nest in the wader at that time so it was
built sometime during the past week. Well I couldn't do
anything about the mice now so I finished gearing up and
we headed out onto the Wicomico River then onto the
Potomac River.
We found a number of boats trolling the channel drop off
near Piney Point so we decided to join the lineup. Paul
began trolling a large chartreuse bucktail jig and an 9
inch Storm Wildeye Swim
Shad. I decided
to use a 20 inch umbrella rig tipped with two trailing 6 inch
chartreuse sassy shads. And to make sure it got down
deep, I put a heavy swivel, a 12 ounce torpedo sinker,
added two feet of 60 pound leader, then tied on the
umbrella rig. This setup is a handful so I decided not
to rig up a second rod and settled in to fish.
Striped bass were all over the place. We marked them
shallow at 12 feet all the way down to 64 feet. The
majority of the fish were hanging between 25 to 35 feet
down and large schools were stacked up on the bottom humps.
The weather was beautiful and the ocean was very calm. The
cool breeze made the day very pleasant and Paul made some
killer roast beef sandwiches. All was good. But the fish
weren't cooperating.
We trolled for several hours with no bites. We swapped out
lures, making sure we didn't run the same type and color,
and varied the distance and depth. Nothing. But we also
noticed the other boats around us weren't getting any
action either. We saw all types of water craft, from
a pontoon boat (crazy to bring a craft like this out
on this body of water) to professional charters. Nobody
was getting a bite. Slowly, as the sun climbed, the
boats began to leave. We slowly trolled our way back to
Cobb Island, fishing the channel drop offs as we
zig-zagged back and forth. We finally had enough and
motored back to Cobb Island where we sat on Paul's
veranda and watched life sail past on Neale Sound.
After battling my way back home through the Friday
afternoon Beltway traffic, I unloaded my gear and told my
wife about what I found in my waders. We went down to the
garage and I showed her where my waders were hanging. Then
I saw it. My Chota Steelheader waders
that I used on the
Salmon River late last year had a hole chewed into
the right leg where the fabric joins the boot! I liked
down into the right leg and saw light coming from
another, smaller hole, about half way up from the larger
one. From what I could figure out, the mice chewed in
from the outside and were building a nest in the boot. A
fresh nest.
My wife looked at bags piled up under the table and began
pulling stuff out. She bent over with a dustpan and wisk
broom and began to sweep debris out as I moved my wading
shoes and waders out of the way. I decided to store them
indoors and not in the garage. Then the screaming began.
"MOUSE! MOUSE! AAAHHHHHHH! AAAHHHHH! AAAHHHHHHH!" she
screamed as she jumped up and down, flapping her arms like
a bird. "I saw it! I SAW IT! I moved a bag and it was
sitting there, staring at me!"
Poor mouse. It was probably scared out of its wits. My wife
pointed out the spot where the mouse was but, of course, it
disappeared. I grabbed a mouse trap and put a dab of peanut butter into it
as bait then waited for the results.
The next morning I checked the trap and there was a mouse
in it. Alive. I took it into the woods behind our house and
let it go. If it's smart, it won't come back. I don't
really want to go lethal on a creature if I can help it.
But a few hours later my daughter came running into the
house and told me she saw another mouse sitting near my
kayak. The second mouse. Number two of the nesting pair.
Out came the traps. They're set up and waiting.
