Man pretty sure he convinced wife his beer cans are fishing lures

Miramichi — The rapids are raging, but thanks to one Miramichi fisherman’s crafty trick, his wife no longer is.

“She doesn’t like me having my beer on the weekends,” said Rod Morley, 51. “She’d rather I go on errands with her, get groceries — you know, just keep her company — but I want to get out to my dock or canoe, crack some brews and reel in some striped bass.

“So anyway, Alpine has these cans that are the spittin’ image of fishing lures, only my wife doesn’t know. She saw the cans in my cooler and on my fly-tying bench next to the lures, and didn’t say a thing. It’s foolproof.”

Rod’s wife Linda said at first she was thrown off by the can design, but she figured out her husband’s ploy right away.

“He thinks he’s so clever. But in the fall I hid all his camo cans in the woods,” she laughed, “and the dummy never did find ’em. He thought he must have just set them down somewhere and lost them. How smart can he be? Now he thinks I actually believe he’s going fishing all weekend by the river with no beer. Sucker.”

Linda asked a Manatee reporter to follow her to the family’s small fishing camp next to the river.

“Just watch him get all flustered when I suggest he try out his big, shiny lures with the friggin’ Alpine logo right on them,” she said, rolling her eyes.

Sure enough, we approached a surprised Rod, who was sitting on a lawn chair outside his camp with several cans of beer within arm’s reach.

“Honey, how about you show me how to cast? I’ve always wanted to learn,” Linda said sweetly.

“Uh…um…you mean…like right now?” he asked. “Not a great day for it. Maybe next week?”

“What? It’s beautiful out — come on, show me how it’s done!”

Rod reluctantly grabbed his rod, picked up a can, and rammed it onto the hook, which should have sprayed beer everywhere. But no liquid escaped.

“What the…” sputtered Rod, holding the can up over his head, to reveal a series of tiny punctures with sunlight shining through.

A smug Linda — who had poked holes in Rod’s “lures,” drained his precious beer into a pitcher for later, and then put the empties back with his fishing gear — asked her husband what was wrong.

“Well…these uh…these lures are defective I think. Something’s off about them…”

Rod, clearly perplexed, then resorted to his regular lures and demonstrated his best casting methods.

“It serves him right,” she told us later, pouring a beer. “If he’s going to abandon me for the dock all weekend, the least he could do is share.”