This month’s big event was a fishing trip in Santa Barbara with Aaron’s (potential) Fall MBA class. We got a hotel room the night before, and after a crazy day of work I arrived late and exhaused to an empty room. Aaron and one of his co-workers showed up shortly thereafter, suffering the effects of a night on the town. The wisdom of going big the night before heading out on the water revealed itself the following morning – after an hour of exhaltation on the water, Aaron heaved over the side and spent the rest of the trip shivering in the fetal position when he wasn’t tossing cookies in the head.
For my part I decided not to fish – I’d never been ocean fishing before and was a bit disillusioned with the process. The captain would steer the boat over a rock, check his fishfinder, announce about how many fish were on the bottom, and then everyone would drop a line and wait about a minute for a bite. If nothing bit in that time they moved on. Making matters worse, the rock fish we were fishing for apparently didn’t handle changes in depth very well, and as they were pulled up the decompression caused their brains to explode and their eyes to bug out of their heads – it was a bunch of catatonic, bug-eyed snapper that came on deck.
Despite the puke and the fish massacre, the trip was a lot of fun. Two gray whales met us on the way out to sea, several sea lions made appearance, and there were tons of birds around the Channel Islands. The weather was sunny, and while cold it was awesome being out in the wind on the water. After getting back to land we ran passed a mouse that was standing on a cat that was in turn standing on a dog in downtown Santa Barbara, ate a delicious meal at Chipotle, and then caught a showing of the heartwarming and very funny (yet overly weiner-revealing) flick Forgetting Sarah Marshall.