Frogs Go Fishing

By Aron Brock

FROGS GO FISHING is a collection of short stories by hilarious author Aron Brock about the travails of fishing with other FROGS — Friendly Retired Old Guys.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781619274020

Book preview

2013

FROGS GO FISHING

1.  FAKE SNAKE OF PANAMA

At the Tropic Star resort In Panama you are treated like a President from the minute you land. You bypass security and customs – they take care of all that for you – and you go directly to the VIP room and get whatever you want as far as drinks, snacks and all that stuff are concerned.

Bypassing customs is big! You don’t have to wait for nothin’. Everything is handled. Panama is the only place that does that for specific fishing groups. And once you’ve had that, you don’t want anything else.

You’re in a particular area with only that resort and you. You’re literally 100 miles away from any roads. This is where John Wayne, Dean Martin and the Rat Pack and all the wealthy people – even to this day – go. Except the dead guys, of course. They allow only living guests. It is one of the world’s top fishing locations for 750-pound marlin.

There you sit down and relax after your long flight, and then they put you in a van and take you to a local hotel. In the morning they take you to a small airport and you get on a small plane that holds only eight to 10 people; you fly for, shoot, what is it? About forty-five minutes to an hour.

They take care to make sure your blood is moving through your body at different points during the flight: If you’ve got high blood pressure — welcome aboard, because it will spike higher as the plane bounces up and down, along with side-to-side motion, until you get over the mountains. You land out in the middle of the sticks, and you’re grateful for even that. When that thing lands, it sounds like it’s crashing. If you look at the tires afterwards, they’re all cracked and ripped, and you’re glad you didn’t look at them before you got on the plane.

One evening, me and my FROG buddy David went down to fish in the cove at the resort. We thought we’d just grab a couple of poles, go to the cove, and see if we couldn’t catch a couple of fish from the shore after dinner.

Now, this country is known for poisonous snakes and everything else that could be dangerous. There had even been a panther sighting, so they warned us to not go too far from the lodge. They do have little trails, but because we’re gringos from the city, we don’t need to stay on any stupid trails, right?

So we jumped off the trail and started working our way down, but all of a sudden we got an odd, eerie feeling and felt movement. What was happening? Every time we took a step, the entire ground around us, an area maybe 12- to 15-feet in diameter – would move, all at the same time.

Now, when you’re taking step after step, and you feel the entire ground around you moving, it’ll get you to stop and think. It was spooky, it was concerning, you know it was. My blood stopped, my heart kept pounding.

As we took another step — because we didn’t know any better — we said, We gotta find out what the heck is going on — because you don’t see this in the US.