fishing

Yes heidi - this post is about fishing.
When I was younger I went fishing every so often. It was a primary activity when we went camping or on trips. By the grace of God, we never caught anything. Except once when my brother caught a rainbow trout in Colorado or Wyoming or some place in that vicinity. He named it Raymond and the father of the family we were with knew what to do with it so he gutted it and did whatever else you do to dead fish and then we each got to eat a little piece of Raymond.

Last night I went fishing in the Mediterranean Sea. A friend of mine has been stuck on fishing for a while and we decided to go. He had a cast and reel rod already and he bought a 12 foot sea rod for the trip. I don't have any gear. He also bought this dough as bait because they told him in the store that it would work.

We left the house at 9:30 PM and I forgot our flashlight. One other guy came with us and he brought the beer and sunflower seeds. I had piled up a bunch of wood for our fire and I brought that. We got to the shore in between Nahariya and Rosh Hanikra and set up (Just south of Betzet Beach). We sat and fished for a while and then got the camp fire lit up and sat around talking, drinking beer and eating sunflower seeds. It was an interesting mixture of Israeli and American culture.

At 1:00 AM we decided to head for home, so we packed up our gear and got into the car. As I got to the turn from the beach road onto the highway the police stopped us to find out what we had been drinking. I told them I hadn't drank anything. One of the guys in the car thought that I should have said I had 1 beer because there was nothing wrong with that. I explained to him that according to the gemara if you admit to partial guilt then you are suspected as to being guilty and if you completely deny then you are assumed completely innocent. The 3rd guy couldn't believe that I was using Talmudic reasoning to justify lying. From a psychological perspective it really wasn't lying. If I said I had 1 beer then they would have assumed that i meant I had 6. So saying 1 would have been lying. By saying I had none I was telling them that i wasn't driving under the influence of alcohol, which was the real question they were asking.

In any case, we didn't catch any fish and I was not very sad about that.