This last weekend, I was fishing Belton. I was in the middle of the lake between Temple Lake Park and Westcliff. It was about 9pm, completely dark and very still. I had my lights on. I watch a boat on full plane come around Temple Lake Park. There is literally a mile of open water in any direction around me. I see that he appears to be heading directly at me, but he is still quite far away. So I hold up my cell phone light and wave it back and forth. He was going easily 50MPH or more. He bore down straight at me. I stood up and was waving my light at him. Remember Front and back lights were on. At the Last second, less than a boat length away, he veers behind me, he past within less than a boat length from me. I was sure that night one or both of us could have died. In the still darkness in the middle of the Lake. I was very shaken. I pulled in all my lines and went in to West Cliff. He was still on the Ramp, I saw him take a swig from a pint. I was still very rattled, I asked him if he saw me sitting there. He said he was sorry and stated his eye sight wasn't that good. I was so rattled, All I could say was I thought I was going to die tonight, I said as much to myself as to him. I believe that that was as close as I've come with Death since I was young and thought I was invincible. So Much for peace and serenity of fishing. Only one other boat on an entire Lake, and he almost hits me. Its no wonder he couldn't see, he was driving so fast, with no glasses that I could see on, and most likely alcohol was involved. I'm getting one of those million watt lights before I go out night fishing again. Be Warned my friends!

Here's a kind of a twofer.....

I was fishing on the rocks at the Miller Rd. train bridge at Ray Hubbard. Some old codger and his idiot grandson were up on the bridge fishing from the walkway. The kid was not in tune with the fishing experience and was being very noisy, inconsiderate, and obnoxious as the old guy bickered at him nonstop.

Just as I was gathering my stuff to move down the riprap and get away from 'em for the dusk bite, I heard this human-sized KER-PLUNK immediately followed by an explosion of hysterical jibberish from ol' Pops. Somewhere amid that imitation of speaking in tongues, I gathered that the young gentleman couldn't swim. *Sigh*

I put down my stuff and ran down the track to the center (of course) and the young kerplunkster had surfaced, all a-spatterin' and a-sputterin' like an outboard being decarbonized. Fine...it's a short swim to the rocks and a chilly ride home.

Oh, wait....he can't swim, apparently. Clearly lavishly nourished in his extended past, he could float....kind of, but apparently no swimmee. He was flailing about in 15' of water like a turtle on it's back with a fish hook in its face. This remains the least-athletic set of motions I've ever witnessed from anyone outside of infants and the especially feeble elderly.

I motioned to Pops that he'd best unveil his A-game frogman act in a hurry, but he made it clear that leaping into the cold water perhaps 20' below was not his cup of tea. Maybe he had lots of grandchildren and could spare this one, so I briefly pondered where he could get a fair shake on a 4'10" coffin as he looked down and yelled "SWIM!" while ensuring there would be no confusion by mimicking the swimming motion with his arms. He couldn't include his legs since he was standing on them at the time.

The shill, panicked wails began. It seemed like it had actually gotten darker in the half minute since he hit the drink. No way was he going to swim the 40 yards or so to the rocks. Pops was redefining the word "useless". An evening swim was imminent.

I jumped in and fished the funky little weirdo out, which took much more effort than one would think. He kept asking who I was and actually resisted the rescue, which I found bizarrely absurd - stranger danger was hardly his primary concern at the moment, and regardless, this was a kid who could make even the most dedicated predator pervert flee for the hills.

After getting him up the rocks for an angry, recrimination-laden reunion with his elder, I plopped down by the train tracks and caught my breath, head in hands and eyes closed. I think I heard him complain to Pops that I tore his shirt. I still hope that's not what actually happened, but I couldn't hear him clearly due to water in my ears and what seemed to be an approaching train.

Yep, here she comes. I scooted a couple feet farther from the track in a pointless indulgence of my comfort zone and continued catching my breath. A smoke, ironically, came to mind, but they were soaked and now resembled Skoal. OK, a cold beer, then.

That's when I noticed my cooler, a new Igloo Playmate, was in the middle of the dandgum train tracks about 2/3 of the way to the middle. Eleven full and one empty bottles of Moosehead beer were ready, with the aid of the cooler, to go toe-to-toe against exactly one trillion US pounds of freight train traveling at no less than upteen kilodoodles per half-hour.

And this was the old Moosehead, before they tragically de-skunk-ified it to appease the palates of those who couldn't find any Coors Light. Furthermore, I was not old enough to have the beer to start with, making it all the more valuable. Clearly, the only rational thing to do was risk my life to protect my brand new cooler. Oh, wait, no....protect the beer. The cooler was a mere hitchhiker now and hardly worth such a risk. I mean, whaddaya think I am....stupid or somethin'?

Oh, and let's not forget the ice....borrowed from the infamous Tampico motel that once stood a few blocks from the WR spillway on E. Grand. I got chased by a fella likely by the name of Patel over that dang ice, and that beer had been festering in it for a couple hours. It had to be right at 32 point zero zero zero one degrees, just how I like it.

So I sprung up like a cougar and dashed down the train track, barely heeding the gaps between the ties. A misadventure there could have resulted in my being pureed by the train, save for a largely intact , but partial leg making a splashdown a few feet from where I'd just rescued the kid.

How senseless that would be, especially considering that there was an aluminum great walkway running along the length of the track. Well, actually, it was a grate walkway, but I found it great since I didn't want the train to kill me an' whatnot. The guy driving the train probably agreed, for as I hopped from the track to the great grate, I'm quite sure I saw his face frozen in a mask of terror, eyes big as saucers. That may have been all in my head, though, as someone in that train was sounding the horn loud enough to make anyone sharp enough to be charging it head-on suffer hallucinations.

The race was a tie. Well, I kind of won, but it was a de facto draw. I stopped my sprint on a dime and reached for the cooler, completely safe exceptin' fer my head, neck, shoulders, chest, and arms, but the train hit the cooler as I yoinked it from the track. It had made it more than halfway to safety, and I don't believe the train hit me at all.

The impact spun me around and knocked the bottom of the cooler off the strange pivoting lid used on Playmates. Into the lake went the beer (and ice), and there I was, white as a sheet and shivering wet/cold, holding the lid-handle of the friggin' cooler. It's the lone time I've littered in a water body.

Upon returning to the parking lot, there was Pops and the kid. They needed a jump start. Before escaping, a burned-up set of jumper cables was added to the evening's toll. Somehow, I made it home without being decapitated in a freak accident or hit by a meteor and found it agreeable to not leave the house at all for a couple days.

Good read, glad you escaped intact!

You have to watch the weather

Great story Billy

Excellent! Thanks...

nice stories

Years back I was fishing when a storm approached.Fish were biting.
I kept saying, just a little longer.The storm is not close.
I was on the bank about 20 yards in a cove from the other bank.
Lightning strikes the other bank.Flash blinds me for a second,
but it was the rush of heat I felt from it that told me how close I came to getting hit.
Will never repeat that mistake again.

Love that Billy story. Excellent writing.

Years ago I was duck hunting on Lake Fork with Dad and best friend Pete. We were in an old Skeeter Hawk bass boat with stick steering, parked in a blind near the shoreline, facing the lake and many large trees and stumps obscuring our view of the bay. Thirty minutes before sunrise happened as and when it usually does, with ducks milling about smartly, some early arrivers already landed and trying to understand why our decoys were not being very sociable. We heard someone off in the bay open the shooting with a four-shot salvo. Shortly thereafter, approximately the time it takes two large men to float upright, we began hearing what sounded like someone yelling "Al" or "Owl". Since none of our hunting party went by that name, and we were not hunting owls that morning, we initially dismissed it a the musings of a tournament bass angler looking for his partner. The Owl calling continued for several minutes and seemed to take on a more rapid, purposeful cadence. Pete finally had enough of it and yelled back "What?" and the Owl calling became an Owl chorus that we now recognized as the word "Haaaaaallllp!" Reluctantly, since we were now at sunup minus 18 minutes with ducks circling our spread, we untied the Skeeter and went looking for the Haallpees. What we found was at once visually stunning and comical: two jumbo (jimbo for any Cajun readers) sized men in camo jumpsuits clinging to, and somewhat impaled upon, partially submerged black locust trees. Adding to the merriment was a skinny black dog of questionable lineage frantically trying to climb inside one of the gent's left nostril. We also found the bow of a small boat pointing vertical from the water, prepared for launch into outer space, along with life jackets and other floating debris typically seen after a successful U-Boat attack. My best guess was the smaller of the two men weighed 280 pounds and his cherubic buddy was half a biscuit shy of 330.
Long story shortened slightly, we ferried the boys and the dog to the shore, where once removed from the relatively toasty 55 degree water to the 45 degree air and 30 degree wind chill, they all began shaking like a coyote trying to pass a razor blade. Fearing 630 pounds of aggregate hypothermia on my hands, I roamed the shore gathering firewood to make them a fire as we waited for the sheriff's boat to arrive. To my utter amazement, one of the intrepid duck hunters began throwing the precious firewood into the lake and yelling "Jessie, get it!" At that point I wished them all the best in their future endeavors and bid them adieu. I forget things all the time but I will never forget the name of that black dog. And though I know they never really figured it out, they were in mortal danger of dying from exposure, since we realized on the long boat ride back to the ramp that we were the only other hunters or fisherman anywhere near them.

http://texasfishingforum.com/forums/ubbthreads.php/topics/5668183/Dying_for_Crappie...Literally

This story by Pope1 beats any that I've run across:

Scarry stuff,makes you stop and think.

I almost got hit in the head by a duck lifting off the water while running across Cedar Creek one night. It's wing brushed my head on the way by. A few inches to the left and it would have been a direct hit.

Was running back up to Big Chief another night, got on the wrong side of an island up there and realized it when the graph jumped from 20+ fow to less than 10 almost instantly. I yanked the throttle into neutral and by the time the hull settled into the water we were beached. Had to roll up our pants and wade in knee deep water to dislodge the boat and get going again. Next trip to the lake my boat had GPS on it.

Another evening at CC alone, it had just gotten dark and was working the boat docks looking for hybrids. I stepped on the bigfoot button and the TM was turned 90 degrees. I was headed overboard, but went to my knees on the remaining two inches of front deck and reached for the gunnel to avoid going overboard. My hand slipped off the gunnel almost as quick as it made contact, and I caught the gunnel just under my left eye. I saw stars for a few minutes, cussed a few minutes longer, finally gathered myself and resumed fishing. The wife woke me up the next morning wondering who I'd been in a fight with. It was a couple years before she let me go night fishing alone again.

At the coast one year with my dad in his 22' runabout. He spots a large rope dangling from an oil rig that has a knot at the end, about 10' off the top of the 3' swells. It was decided we'd tie off to the rope and fish a bit. So my dad takes position on the bow of the boat as his buddy maneuvers the boat into position. My dad grabs the knotted rope as we come up on a swell and misses his attempt to snap the clip from our rope onto there's. We are now dropping back into the ditch and for some reason my dad decided it was better to hang onto the rig rope. As the boat dropped it was pulled away from the rig just enough to cause my dad, now swinging on the end of the rope attached to the oil rig, to swing right into a large barnacle covered piling which caught him square in the back. Somehow he managed to hang onto the rope, and his return swing timed perfectly with the boat coming back into position on another swell for him to step right back onto the bow of the boat and let go of the rope. Not really a near death, but a lesson learned the hard way. His back looked like he'd been whipped like a slave, those barnacles tore him up.

A hilarious story where I feared for my life at the time but was not in any real danger; We used to camp at the boat ramp in Freeport when taking dad's boat offshore. I was a kid at the time (long ago) about 13-14yrs old, and the grown ups would sit around the fire drinking beer while I netted crabs at night. I went to bed one night and left the crab nets out. The next morning we're all about to get in the boat when my dad reminds me my nets were still out, tied to the now extremely busy boat dock. I start yanking the nets up and throwing the crab back in the water. I pulled the last net up and it had a huge crab in it. I grabbed it by both claws and when I turned around to show it to my dad there was a girl about 12-13yrs old walking down the dock to get in a boat. The turn and my display of the crab was times perfectly so that she was face to face with that crab, and you'd have thought I had a rattle snake in my hands. She immediately began screaming bloody murder and backing away in complete state of panic. She backed right off the dock into chest deep water, and for a split second it seemed to calm her down. That is, until she realized where the crab I was holding actually came from, then she freaked out again screaming bloody murder when I tossed the crab in the water right next to her in my effort to lend her a hand to get back onto the dock. I didn't know it at the time, but her mother was bearing down on me like mama bear protecting her cub, and she got to me just about the time her cub was once again safe and sound on the dock. Mama bear lit in to me calling me every bad name one could think of, cussing me like a grown man while my dad and his buddies were not helping the situation by rolling around in the boat laughing their asses off. They were laughing more at the cussing I was taking than they were at the girl falling in the water. But mama bear didn't get that part of the joke and was cussing me even harder because they were laughing. I finally grabbed up the nets and left mama bear standing there still cussing at me as I hauled my butt to the truck to deposit the nets. She never even slowed down enough for me to explain it was a complete accident, she thought I was being a little punk and scared her daughter for fun, and that made it all the more funny to the crew in my dad's boat.

Huh?

He said his back looked like he had been whipped like a slave

Cuts of various lengths at various angles all over it.