Jon Boat Battery will be the next 2 or 3 part segment in the Team Lightning story series. As you may have gathered from reading the past couple of stories, our luck isn’t the best when it comes to fishing adventures. But bad luck is nothing compared to the luck that Chris has with batteries though.
First let me give you a little background on the battery that we use. The battery actually belongs to Chris’s sister’s boyfriend, Dave. He also owns the jon boat. The battery is a nice Optima Blue Top marine battery. For some reason which I never fully understood there is a metal wrench which is just the right length to touch both posts of the battery at the same time, attached with a piece of hay string. Keep this in mind.
Let me start off with our most recent battery misadventure. We decided to bring out the jon boat for the first time this season. The jon boat is a little rough but that’s a whole different story. So I drive to Chris’s house in my truck, which is what we carry the jon boat in, to get him and the boat. We pull around to the garage where he has the boat and the battery ready to go. The battery has been sitting on the charger for a while so we are pretty sure it’s fine, even though we haven’t used it since last season. Prior to this we decided that we were going to fish at a spot called Devil’s Pond in South Rehoboth. This spot is rumored to have some huge bass in it.
So we load up the boat into my truck with all our rods and equipment and head off. When we get to Devil’s pond we start to unload all the stuff and get ready to fish. Chris attached the trolling motor and then it’s my job to hook up the battery. (As you will learn in the coming stories, there is a good reason that I hook up the battery) I hook up the battery and nothing happens. No spark. Nothing. The trolling motor doesn’t even flinch. My first thought is that the battery must be dead. It seems more likely that the battery is dead than the trolling motor. Chris then decides to call up one of our friends, Steve, to bring us a battery. Steve also has a boat so he called up another one of his friends to come fish with us also.
Steve arrives about 25 minutes later with a battery for us. He gives us the battery and then starts to unload his boat. I hook up the new battery, which Steve says works, and once again nothing. A second before I went to hook up the new battery, Chris had taken his battery and went to put it in my truck so that nobody would take it assuming that Steve’s battery would work.
Only a second or two after I try to hook up the other battery I hear Chris yelling “Fire”. I turn around to see him bent over in pain holding his hand, while the hay string attached to the battery is on fire INSIDE of my truck. I drop what I’m doing with the battery and the trolling motor and proceed to putting out the fire. Chris is still double over in pain from getting shocked on his hand saying “F*** that hurt” over and over. At this point I’m trying to make sure that there’s no embers or anything that could catch on fire. There was actually one of my sweatshirts pretty much touching the battery which I’m surprised didn’t catch on fire. Chris is still looking at his hand. He’s kind of laughing but also in pain.
The best part about this whole story is that this doesn’t even remotely phase Steve and his friend. They just laugh, get into their boat and start fishing like nothing even happened. Needless to say we didn’t get out on the water that day. We did try to do some shore fishing down the street at Shad Pond but it was so windy that my hands were literally almost frozen. Just another usual fishing day for Team Lightning.
