THE TROUT THIEF

ONCE AGAIN A TRUE OCCURRENCE (HEY WHO COULD MAKE THIS SHIT UP?)
A little while after the great lettuce smackdown and my last semi-permanent stay at Bayview I was sick of spending all my cash on weekly motel rooms, I was offered a place to couch it for awhile with a guy I had met and decided to room with someone for the first time in many many years, I can barely live with myself much less someone I hardly knew outside of one of Tahoe's many watering holes. But I needed to save,and moved on in anyway.

Now little brother (40) had found a wife and left our beautiful lake for the foothills of Placerville. It had been two months without hearing hide nor hair from him, when I got a phone call from Ryan that John had come back to town for the day and was looking for me. Before you know it the tree stooges were back in action once again! They rolled up to the house with enough booze to supply a college frat party, and it was on. Now my new roomie was more serious about alcohol than any of us, and that was pretty hard to do in those daze. Serious enough that he would wait for the liquor store to open in the mornings to get something to steady his hands enough to hold his wrenches at work. So needless to say he was more than ready to help out with eliminating some of that evil alcohol.

Well the drunker we got the more we drank, and the more we drank, the taller the boots would have to be to wade through all of the bullshit being circulated. After several hours Fogo decides to reveal a secret fishing hole to us. Well I don't know about anybody else but I generally fish in the early morning. Ryan and Fogo decide to go fishin' in the middle of the night and did so. John and I were drunk but not that drunk, so they left, and we drank more, and had a few more laughs and basically passed out.

We were rudely awakened at about 11am by these clowns rolling back home, how they made it there or back is a wonder! And after Ryan tells us about Fogo building a campfire (it was still freezing out) he fell asleep and caught his freakin boots on fire. They got up and fished. And they came home with about 15 decent keeper trout, and we both were impressed. That is until Jim breaks out the biggest damn trout I had ever seen taken out of a river. It had to be 4 or 5 lbs. which is a damn big rainbow trout. We were amazed and surprised, we would be eatin fish for dinner. We thought we would anyway. After a few celebratory rounds I went back to sleep and left the other tree idiots to sleep or tell a few more fish stories or whatever I was hungover and sleepy. Apparently we all fell asleep, or so I thought. We awoke to some really foul language that assaulted us out of sleep and into the kitchen where Ryan was standing pissed off. His big rainbow was MIA. So was Fogo. We waited for hours figuring out exactly where said trout had parted to or more importantly where Mr. Fogo had slunk off to, we searched around the bars, just missing him every step and finding out that Fogo had caught this trout! At least that is what the asshole told anyone that would listen, and with that kind of a fish a lot of people listened to his story. He totally stole the fire and the fish, when we later found him he refused to admit he had stolen it! Even after a few lumps distributed by the angry Irish he claimed that the cat must have taken it out of the sink. The fish cleaned weighed more than the feline. We never found the fish, but we are pretty sure that Fogo in a grand attempt at ass kissing had delivered the trout to his boss as a gift trying to make points to cover his boozing problem. Months after in his 14th or 15th DUI Fogo T-boned a doctor in a new SUV and ended up in prison, we never talked again. But we did see that fishing hole quite a few more times and still visit, and rarely if ever get skunked, although we have never taken another Rainy out the likes of the one that got taken away.