Redneck Computer Geek

Leaving today for the ‘Rivah’.  Fishing, crabbing, boating by day, blogging and emails by night.

Here’s a sample of what a vacation packing checklist is for a Redneck Computer Geek:

• crab pots
• frozen herring (crab pot bait)
• fishing poles
• tackle boxes
• laptop
• battery charger / AC adaptor for laptop
• battery charger for Blackberry
• battery charger for other laptop
• other laptop
• fishing bait
• beer
• beer
• beer
• food

Gotta check the fishing report message forums, wind forecast, and tidal charts online while I’m down there.

Sometimes I love being a RNCG!

Found this posted from a friend of mine in our World of Warcraft’s guild’s message forum. It’s more Redneck than Geek, but really funny, and I guess the geek-factor comes from the fact that it was on a gaming forum:

A week in the remote highlands of North Carolina with my wife, a flyrod, a box of Hoyo de Monterey Excaliburs and plenty of 18 year old scotch was long overdue and all to short.

It turns out that I still know how to catch trout, read books, scramble up rock faces and swim in white water.

Swimming in white water is a great skill to have when you are not aware that you’re fishing downstream from a TVA dam that’s about the start generating electricity, which apparently results in an awful lot of water coming down the stream in a very short amount of time. As I understand the entire process, the guys at the dam wait until you find the perfect little trout pool and have made a sweetheart of a cast. Once all your attention is focused on that little dry fly drifting across the pool, they throw a switch that opens a gate in the dam, allowing several thousand gallons of water to flow gently out of the dam at about mach 12. The guys in the dam find this HIGHLY amusing, I’m sure. The water then gradually picks up speed coming down the stream, carrying twigs and sticks at first and eventually entire boulders and even small towns.

The first thing you notice downstream is a change in the sound of the water. The peaceful treble of water trickling over rocks turns into a low pitch hum increasing in intensity until your mind is forceably wrenched from it’s state of ZEN and you realize that your dry fly, once drifting lazily in the pool ahead of you, is now streaking by with the velocity of a shooting star. The epiphony that follows, less elegantly described by some as an “OH SHIT” moment, occurs when you realize that Shit’s Creek is a real place and you’re in it.

At moments like these, the best you can hope for is that there is someone is close-by to hear you face death with a casually whitty remark. Looking into the sky and saying something like, “Is this the BEST YOU GOT?” just as you’re overtaken by the wall of water might be appropriate. I’ve found that it’s best to have such a remark prepared in advance since coming up with one while running and screaming like a little school-girl is much harder than you might think. For the unprepared, your whitty remark may sound suspiciously like “AARGHHHGHGH… gurgle, gurgle”, which has no humorous value whatsoever, unless you’re a dam-keeper, in which case it’s possibly the funnies thing you’ve heard since, oh, about this time yesterday.

Once you’ve been turned over 4 or 5 times and struck at least 3 limbs on immovable objects, you really should check to make sure the $1200 4-piece split bamboo flyrod you were carrying is STILL a 4-piece split bamboo flyrod. It’s important to remember that your limbs will heal, but that bamboo flyrod, well, they just don’t make them anymore. If you’re any kind of man at all, you’ll be using your one remaining functional limb to thrust the rod straight up into the air and out of harm’s way…….

And remember, should the locals inquire about your injuries, do NOT tell them the story from the stream. THEY ALL know that only a moron would fish that stream after 5pm and one of them is likely to be a Game Warden who wants to see your National Park Trout Stamp and the other might very well be the guy who works at the dam.

That’s funny stuff right there!

I’m headed out on vacation next week. I can’t wait.

The down-side is that the workload at the office is always double the week before AND the week after vacation.  But that’s another topic.

I’m headed to the “Rivah” (Rappahannock River), to a little house on a creek.  I’ll tie my boat to the dock and take my son fishing and crabbing every day.

We’ll walk along the beach picking up shells, we’ll watch the bald eagles play, we’ll pull up crab rings along the pier, and we’ll check the minnow trap for minnows…usually about once every 10 minutes (my son is 5).

We’ll put out crab pots…box-traps with frozen herring for bait.  Crab pots are messy things…you pull them up off the bottom and they sling all kinds of mud into your boat…not to mention how wonderful herring smells after a day of rotting in 76 degree water.  But it’s all good, since at the end of the day we’ll have a couple-dozen crabs to steam up.

We’re also going for my son’s “Junior Angler Award”.  That’s a program here in Virginia where, if you’re under 15 years old, you get a prize if you catch 6 different species by hook and line.  So far he’s caught Croaker, Spot and Flounder, and that was just one trip.  With a week to try, I’m pretty sure we can get White Perch, Bluefish, and either Striper or Oyster Toad (yup…Toadfish is on the list!).  He’ll get a certificate and either a hat or a tackle box.  Ever practical, he says, “You can only wear a hat.  You can do all kinds of stuff with a tacklebox!”

The cool thing about the place we go every year, though, is that it has DSL!  So I get all the benefits of having a day of redneck-pursuits, and then at night I can hook up my laptop and blog, chat with friends, email, and even play video games from the front porch, as I watch the sun set into Carter’s Creek.

Doesn’t that just sound like a little bit of heaven?