Standing in a store looking over the colorful bottles recently, my eyes settled on the Jack Daniels display. I smiled and laughed over an adventure memory worthy of sharing just among us close friends.

One chilly afternoon in the mountains of far NorCal, some decades ago, an adventure plan was hatched. My old buddy Roger, myself, and Jack Daniels went frog gigging.

Roger’s wife had promised to fix us her renowned frog leg dinner if we would go get some. We may have been able to find frog legs in a store there in Redding, California, but where is the adventure in that?

It never seemed to take much encouragement to get me and Roger to go adventuring. We found his trusty old frog gig in a corner of his garage where there just happened to be a bottle of Jack Daniels stowed away securely.

We left a little early and brought along some fishing gear so we could cast for bass in the late afternoon before dusk, and before the frogs came out around the picturesque lake we chose.

We logically opined that the only thing better than a frog leg dinner was a frog leg and bass dinner.

As the late afternoon sun waned, dusk settled in and the forecast frost seemed a certainty, we found ourselves leaning heavily on our friend Jack Daniels.

By the time darkness set in and the frogs came out, Jack Daniels had become a strong influencer, but we had several nice bass caught and filleted, and we were rigged up and ready for frogs.

Roger spotted a rather large frog and stuck it with his gig. Sadly, the handle came out of the gig so there went Roger and Jack Daniel, hopping down the steep shoreline slope behind that escaping frog, trying to poke the stick back in the gig, one handed of course because his other hand was wrapped firmly around the bottle.

The frog, the gig, the stick, Roger and Jack Daniels all ended up in the cold lake. At one point everything was underwater except the bottle, which Roger valiantly held up out of the water because Jack Daniels doesn’t mix all that well with lake water.

I thought I was going to die laughing!

How did the adventure yarn end up? The frog wasn’t stuck badly, so it easily shook off the gig and swam away into the darkness, so nobody got hurt much.

And, well, the bass dinner that night wasn’t bad either, so it all turned out as many adventures do … not quite as planned but good enough for a story to remember and share.