I know better than this, but blinded by a nice spring morning and biting fish I kind of forgot.

And I nearly paid a pretty good price for it, too.

Thankfully, I was on familiar ground -- a typical choice for me being McGrath Pond in Oakland. It's 5 minutes from the house and perfect for plunking the canoe into the water for the first time in the season. It was cold and breezy, but the few smallmouth bass in the pond were at least interested in what I had to offer at the end of my line.

But I wasn't quite satisfied with what I had in front of me. Looking at 3 cormorants lined up on the rocks jutting out from a small island, I knew they had to know where the fish were congregating -- and I'd had luck out there in summers past.

Not thinking, I pointed the canoe toward the island and paddled.

The stiff wind, though, pushed me right on past the island and into a cove on the oppposite shore. I stupidly thought the wind would die down, so I waited on the chance to paddle back across. It never came.

Two tries later, two 180-degree turns later, I was still in the cove with no hope of paddling across by myself. I found an open swath of grass on the property and pulled the canoe ashore. Then I called my wife and told her I was going to need help.

I had to walk more than a mile along a twisted labyrinth of roads to get back to my car -- then drive back down the road marked "PRIVATE" and to the lawn where I'd left my canoe under the "NO TRESPASSING" sign.

I loaded up and made a quick escape, more embarrassed about having been so careless on the water than about having been on someone else's property. I'm fairly certain it could have been easily been explained.

Moral of the story? Even when you know where you are, even when you're sure you know what you're doing, caution has to be front and center. Consequences can be disastrous -- far more so than hopping out of a canoe on a shore a mile from the launch site -- if you don't.

No matter how many fish you can catch out by that island in a 20 mph wind...

-- TB