As I stand on the shore, I take a deep breath and scan the water. I’m always confident that I’m going to catch fish. A lot of the time, though, it doesn’t work out that way.

A 20-foot boat my friend Matt Fair and I bought through Craigslist will certainly even the odds.

On our first outing at Pueblo Reservoir, Matt settles into the driver’s seat and we chug away from the dock, careful not to make any waves in the no-wake zone.

Soon we are up to full speed, heading toward the nearest cove. The first thing I notice is the slight shudder coming from the engine of the boat. I shake it off and reason that it’s an old boat that’s been sitting for a while and needs to stretch its muscles.

After about 20 minutes of travel, we pull into a cove, where I cut a worm in half and place it on my hook. I throw the line out and let the weights pull the worm deeper into the water. There’s no worry of snagging my hook on something close to the shore. I’m sitting on the swimming platform of our boat, dipping my toes in the water with a grin on my face that grows with each cast.

The mechanic in Matt starts looking over the boat to make sure there are no problems. As far as I’m concerned, as long as we’re floating, there can be nothing wrong. Matt takes the cover off the engine, and I hear him utter the last words you want to hear when you’re in a boat in the middle of the lake.

“Angelo, we’re taking on some water.”

With an adrenaline high, I reel in as fast as humanly possible and throw my head into the engine compartment. Sure enough, there is an audible sound of water dripping. Falling over each other, we reach the bilge pump that pushes any water the boat has taken on out the back, and marvel at the amount of water coming out. Several agonizing minutes pass until the bilge has pumped all the water from the boat into the lake, and we let out a sigh of relief, knowing we don’t have to swim to the shore.

Standing on the boat, we frantically bounce ideas off each other about how we could be taking on water. Then it dawns on us. We forgot to pull the plug on the rear of the boat while at the launching dock. It drains all water from previous outings on the water.

Laughing, Matt claps me on the shoulder, and we head to another cove so that we can resume fishing. Before I send my line out though, we open the engine compartment, and this time we don’t hear or see any water coming in. Matt turns on the radio as I cast into the water, and I can feel the tension melting off my shoulders, as Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” plays in the background. We sit in the cove for more than an hour, hardly drifting from where we stopped the boat, and to our excitement there is no water in the engine compartment.

The sun is starting to set, which is the perfect time to fish, so we push the boat out farther into the water to another cove. This time, when we stick our heads into the engine compartment, we discover more water in the boat. Again we activate the bilge pump, and after it empties the water, we hang our heads and motor back to the marina. With no fish in the ice chest, I contemplate the popular fishing saying that “the worst day of fishing is better than the best day of work.”

Unless you’ve got a boat that takes on water.

Angelo Stambene enjoys a day on Pueblo Reservoir.