On a cool October day in 1994, my mom, dad and I decided to go to the beach and try our luck at pier fishing.

At 6:00 am, Saturday morning, we woke up and packed the car. We are on the road by 7:00 am. By 715 am, we pulled into Hardees to eat. My family loves to fish, but we really love to eat. I had raisin cinnamon biscuits, dad had biscuits with gravy and mom had grits. (YUCK!)

After we finished our breakfast, we were back on the road. It is about a 3 hour drive... Only 2 hrs and 45 minutes left.

About 45 minutes later we pulled into a Rest Area. Our Rest Area stops are not normal ones!

The moment the car stops, my mom slings open the car door and them proceeds to "run" around the car. It is truly a spectacle. One of the truckers thought she was injured and offered to shoot her to put her out of her misery. Dad and I walked to the building and leave mom as she runs around in the parking lot. We use the rest room and reach the car. Mom and I get right in and are ready to go. Dad waits till we are all buckled in and then decides to light his pipe and smoke outside the car.

We are on the road again. We get about 5 minutes from the beach and guess what? LUNCH TIME! We stop at one of the local dives (The Breakfast House) and eat! We have certain places we love to stop and this is one of them.

It is almost 12:30 by the time we make it to the hotel. We check in and guess what the first thing we do is? Eat? No, now it is time to sleep. We get up at the crack of dawn to get there to fish, eat the entire way there and when we "finally" make it, we fall asleep.

We sleep till 4pm. Ready to fish! Mom and I are the big fisherman. Pokey, my dad, is considered moderate.

There is a small boat dock on the bay side of the hotel. We get our poles, squid, cutting board and walk over to it to fish.

Dad is our major source of cut bait. (That is one reason we bring him along) He will sit there and cut squid up while mom and I bait the hooks and get the poles ready. Between the three of us, we use 7 poles. All are baited and in the water.

After 10 minutes we get our first bit. Mom grabs the pole and jerks so hard, we thought she hooked a great white shark.

Dad and I sat there and laughed. then her pole starts to bend. We were not laughing anymore. She caught something and it was pulling pretty well.

As she is reeling in her line, dad and I are hanging over the side of the boat dock, looking in the water to see her catch. Usually when you catch a spot, croaker, etc., there is a silver flash when the fish nears the waters surface.

We didn't see the flash of white. What we saw was a long brown streak. I have fished in the ocean many times and have never seen a brown streak. she got it to the boat dock and lifted her line out of the water. Dangling from her hook was a slithering eel. It was about 3 feet long and none of us wanted to touch it.

She laid him on the dock and it starts wiggling and shaking, twisting her hooks, line and weights. Since non of us wanted to touch it, we threw a towel over him and contemplated our next move. Since I was the biggest, I was voted as the hook remover.

the towel is on the eel. Dad steps on it's tail, mom steps on the middle section and I take the pliers and try to perform dentistry on "the Creature".

I removed the hook, mom and dad jumped off the eel like scared little girls. :) Ok, I jumped back too. Now, the hook was removed and he had "untwisted" himself from the fishing line.

Dad came up to me, put his arm on my shoulder and said, "Ok Bubba, now what?" Still not wanting to touch the eel, I took the tip of the fishing pole and slowly directed the eel to the side of the dock.

He went head first into the bag and we sat there and watched him slither away.

About 5 minutes later, we started getting bites. We ended up catching a lot of spots, croaker and some more eels. Toward the end, we were no longer afraid and each of us could take the eels off our lines.

It started getting dark, so we went to dinner. After dinner we went back to the hotel and watched some TV.

I asked my dad what time we were going to start fishing. His response was "No rush, whenever we wake up. We fished the next day and headed home, stopping and eating 3 or 4 times.