My Biggest Fishing Train Wrecks

The week the Outdoor Blogger Network has a writing prompt titled Damaged Goods. Here is the idea:

If you have broke, damaged, or set on fire a favorite piece of outdoor gear we want to hear your story!

I have a few stories, which I will do in multiple posts.

Can you guess what this first story is about?

For about 10 years in a row from the mid-90's to the mid-2000's I made the trek down to SE WI to fish the Fall salmon run. I would go in early to mid October to fish the Root River in Racine and the Pike River in Kenosha. One of the places I fished was Lake Michigan where the Pike River flowed into the lake. Sometimes the wave action from Lake Michigan would close up the river mouth with sand; The river comes out at a beach. To get fish you need the river flowing into the lake. The first time I witnessed the phenomenon of the river being closed up by sand, I had the bright idea to try to do something about it. I went and got a 5 gallon bucket from the car and set about making a channel from the river to the lake. The idea was to get some water to start to flow, which would naturally cause erosion in the sand making a wider channel until eventually the river would be flowing into the lake, which would bring the fish in close. Well the plan worked and once I got the channel made water was soon flowing quickly from the river into the lake. I kept working to expand the channel and the flow got better and better. One time when I bent down to scoop some sand while I was in the middle the channel my cell phone popped out of the pouch on my waders. At this point the river flow was such that the cell phone was instantly swept away from me right into the lake. Just like that it was gone. I couldn't believe it. As the Z-Train would say, "train wreck."