Awesome story, coach!
Funny thing is my uncle had a camp in Empire, I spent many summer nights trying to sleep in the heat. It is funny, the entire time your there everyone complains about the heat,no shower, shady generator yet the next weekend the same folks are back at the same camp complaining about the same things.
I thought shell Island was the only fishing spot in the world until I was nearly 15 years old. Every morning and evening we would go there. View changed every year and you knew at some point, with the rapid rate of coastal erosion, shell island would simply be GPS coordinates. It wasn't long after that we "thought" we were beyond the island. We were actually on the island in 6 inch of water. The horn on the Evinrude 120 was broke and we burned the motor up.
I also remember fishing at night under the lights off of his neighbors dock. My brother and I would stay up all night catching trout, at first sign of daylight we were heading to shell island.
I drank my first beer in Empire, got stuck by my first catfish and loved bringing friends who never fished to show them what it was about.
Before I get too long winded myself, August 1995, myself, my brother and my cousin decided to go to "The Camp" (as we also called it). My grandmaw being the typical grandmaw she is gave us a pack of Mckenzie cinnamon rolls to take with us. None of us felt like taking them b/c as usual we would eat the fish we caught, but how do you tell granny "no" we don't want the cinnamon rolls you bought us. So i stuck them in my backpack to satisfy her. We were in my cousins 16' flat. We hadn't even got out of view from Delta Marina when the sky opened up. Finished the drive to "The camp" in a storm, finally made it dripping wet. The rain finally stopped, leaving us about hour of daylight left. After we unloaded the bare essentials we headed for the island. An hour later, now dark, we don't have a fish in the boat. I am ok with not catching fish, the problem was, we now didn't have dinner for the night. After several failed ideas, and several even worse attemps to catch dinner at night, we all remembered grandmaw taking care of us. There we were, sitting in "The camp", still wet, the lights going on and off, argueing over who gets to sleep next to the window(that was the only spot with an even remote breeze) eating grandmaws McKenzies cinnamon rolls.
Sadly,the camp is now going, ironically, so is Mckenzies. But grandmaw is still here, and that is plenty enough for me.
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