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When I was in high school I worked down at the local marina as a launch attendant. My boss was an avid fisherman who also ran his own chartering business. While I did have some experience fishing it was mainly from summer trips to Maine. Consequently, the only fish I had ever caught at the time were freshwater. Well, it was inevitable that at some point I would pick up saltwater sport fishing.
My coworkers and I got along well. One had a sailboat, one had knowledge of saltwater fishing, and I had a powerboat at the time. It’s difficult to fish off of a sailboat so my boat was the obvious choice when we would go saltwater fishing together.
Lake fishing is a lot of wait-and-see, but saltwater fishing can be very exciting especially in the early morning hours. When my friend told me we were going to meet down on the docks the next morning at 4:30 AM, I thought he was joking. Sure enough, we were all down on the docks by 4:30 AM. The sun was just beginning to rise and the water was glass flat, not yet churned by the days building winds and boat traffic.
We would leave the docks sipping our coffee keeping an eye out for any signs of a good fishing spot. I learned that fishing was much less of a wait-and-see sport and much more of a strategy game. Don’t wait for the fish to find you, find the fish.
All too often in our lives we wait for the opportunity to come to us. Challenges come to us, but opportunities? Opportunity must be sought after and discovered. Each and every morning that we went fishing we had to find out where the fish were feeding. It wasn’t easy knowing where to look, but experience would eventually lead us to finding the fish more often than not.
In life you can’t just sit around waiting for the opportunity to find you, experience has taught me that you have to make an effort to find it. Just like the vast oceans filled with fish, there is a plethora of opportunity if you’re willing to seek it out.
