“Throw, cast, throw, cast, throw, cast.” The thoughts that circulate in my mind for hours, as I bake in the sun, listening to a football game I wish I was watching on my couch. I continue to cast into the water even though my mind knows that the chance of catching something is very low.

On Sept. 20, I competed in the first Texas High School Bass Fishing competition of the season on Lake Lewisville. I say that I competed, but that ended up not being true because of the events that transpired during the day.

On the morning of the tournament me, my dad, and my fishing partner left the boat ramp at 6:40 a.m. and went to the southwest end of the lake, arriving there at 6:55 a.m. We put the trolling motor down in the water, turned it on and pressed the pedal. It didn’t work.

The trolling motor is one of the most important parts of the boat during a tournament. A trolling motor allows a boat to move along banks, coves, as well as places where you wouldn’t go with just the big motor. With a trolling motor, it’s also possible to move much more slowly and stay in the same place without drifting from the current.

We had a very big problem. Without the trolling motor, it was going to be very hard to fish in the places we wanted to. We might have to tie up somewhere or just drift. When we opened the motor, we found that a fishing line had wrapped around it, completely burning it up. When I saw that, I knew we were in for a very long day.

Even though the odds were stacked against us, and there was a low chance of us having a good day, we were still determined to catch some fish. We started by drifting in and out of marinas, but since we spent most of our morning working on the trolling motor, I knew that the fish were probably in deeper water now.

We went back to the north end of the lake, where we found a tree to tie up to and fish. After an hour there, I knew that we were not going to catch any more fish, so I turned a football game on the speaker and relaxed for the rest of the day.

As I was sitting on the boat slowly casting into the water, I realized why I truly love fishing. I don’t love fishing because I catch fish; I love fishing because of the process. Each time I go fishing, there’s going to be a problem I have to deal with and that’s what makes it fun. Some people might think fishing is easy because of how it looks so simple, but the challenges an angler faces are not always easy to see. On any given day, your equipment could stop working, your rod could break, or the fish could just not be where you thought. That’s why fishing intrigues me, it’s a constant chase of a feeling that you can never forget.

Even though we didn’t catch anything that day, we were able to get the motor fixed by the next tournament, where we caught six fish and were able to weigh in. I’m still optimistic that we will have a successful year despite our awful start.