The ceiling fans came on for the first time Tuesday, and every piece of paper in the house is limp with humidity.
That means only one thing that matters. When there's that much water in the air, you might as well get in the water, as in wade fishing.
This has been a strange year for fishing. I usually start in February, fishing for walleyes and stripers in high, skinny water above the lakes. I've usually had at least one good float fishing trip for smallmouth bass by now, along with a good hybrid fishing trip somewhere, and I've usually chased largemouth bass on a couple of lakes.
Not this year. Chronic wasting disease has become almost a beat of its own, and it kept me off the water for most of the spring. I forbade deer from getting CWD for turkey season. They mostly complied, but I heard of two more cases as I drove home from a great turkey hunting trip at Madison County Wildlife Management Area.
Ahhh, wild turkeys. If we had as many of them as we have deer, and an extra two weeks to hunt them, I'd say we have it good. Let's add a commensurate number of quail for good measure.
I'm tired of CWD, but we've got it, and it's not going away, so we might as well get on with our lives and let that wheel spin as it will.
Some friends are organizing a trip somewhere close to fly fish for bream. It's a lot of fun catching bluegills and shellcrackers on popping bugs under catalpa trees in the summer. It evokes fond memories of fishing with my late uncle Demp Ramsey, with whom I spent the summer of 1977 on his old houseboat at Wright. Demp was his real name. He taught me how to scull a flatbottom boat and how to work a fly rod.
The water at Wright was red with iron, so I mostly drank Welch's grape soda and Fanta orange soda. I haven't much cared for them since.
Brush piles were underwater at the end of Demp's dock. Two big lights on booms hung over the water. When he turned them on late at night, insects swarmed the lights immediately. A great many fell in the water and formed the base of an aquatic food chain. Small fish circled under the lights, and bigger fish swirled under them. They were giant white crappie, the biggest I've ever caught.
The next day, we scaled them with spoons and cleaned them. It's a messy and inefficient way to clean fish, but that's how I did it until 2000, when my buddy Dave -- a chief master sergeant at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City -- sold me on the virtues of filleting fish.
Demp, bless his Puritan soul, said filleting was wasteful. With all respect, sir, it's a bigger sin to waste all that time than it is to waste a few tastrels of fish clinging to a rib bone.
Speaking of filleting knives, I have a nice one from Buck. One of my dogs got in my shop and chewed up the handle. My Rapala electric is about worthless. It's lone attribute is that you can run it off a car battery. My Mister Twister electric runs a lot faster and does a much better job.
I finished rigging out my new Hobie Revolution kayak last week, and I'm eager to use it. I fitted it with a Lowrance Elite 4X HDI graph and transducer. I also installed accessory rails and rod holders, and a leash attachment for the Mirage drive. It doesn't float, and a replacement costs about $600.
Next, I'm going to install waterproof LEDs for night fishing and navigation.
I've added a snorkel, mask and flippers to my creek fishing kit. You can learn a lot poking around underwater in the deep holes of mountain streams. You can see where fish actually dwell, and you can see exactly what kind of cover and structure are on the bottom. It's also a great way to shoot underwater video with a GoPro. An iPhone shoots excellent underwater video, too, if it's in a Lifeproof case.
Some of the year's best fishing is in the fall, but I've missed a lot of it in recent years because I spend so much time deer hunting. Deer hunting is our most popular outdoor sport in terms of participation, so it always made sense to do what most of our readers do.
There has to be balance, though. Lakes, rivers and streams are beautiful in the autumn. They're as good of places to be as any.
Sports on 05/12/2016