Redfish Can't Jump

If the weather won't let you go fishing with your buddies, you might as well go drinking with them. And it helps when there's a good fishing related event in the deal. Wednesday's grim weather forecast kept Eric and me off the western roads (we're such wimps) but allowed us the great pleasure of attending a screening of Redfish Can't Jump at a local Raleigh watering hole.

Redfish Can't Jump is a captivating treatment of the joy, beauty, and difficulty of chasing our state fish, the redfish (or red drum, spot tail, puppy drum, whatever you might call them) in these North Carolina waters, but it’s also a thoughtful documentary on the issue of gill nets and how our state's fishing regulations are exposing the species, along with the sea turtles that share the coastline, to great harm.

What Would Brook Trout Do?

Eric, being the veteran trout man that he is, walked by the large stretch of shallow, sandy-bottomed slick water without a second thought. Fred, not far behind, did the same. Both were focused on more promising habitat, real trout water, the quicker flow and plunge pools that started some seventy-five yards upstream.

Bringing up the rear, I quietly waded into the still water, figuring that I might just as well catch nothing where the fishing was easy than catch nothing where the fishing was hard.

Wintry Mix

I'm feeling a bit like this pine seedling - bowed, but not broken. The weather has been such that I've been toying with the idea of changing the name of this blog to...

Mike's Wishing He Could Go Fishing But It Won't Stop Freakin' SNOWING... Again.

...but it might be a little long. So I guess I'll just leave the title as it is and hope that someday it will be true. In the meantime, I'll simply enjoy the snowy beauty that surrounds me. And here's a few images for you as well.

Counting Mississippis

A repost, of a sort...

Huddled under the dense streamside rhododendrons in an attempt to escape the downpour, we tried to recall how many Mississippis there are in a mile. You know. Flash, 1-Mississippi, 2-Mississippi, 3-Mississippi, and so on, until, Boom. Divide the number of Mississippis by five (or is it ten?) and you have an approximation of how many miles away the lightning had struck. Five or ten, it didn’t really matter, as our flashes and our booms were now just a startled heartbeat apart, indicating a distance more appropriately measured in feet than in miles. It was no time to be near the water.

The Run

Warning: Professional driver on closed course. Don't try this at home. Unless, that is, you too happen to have 400 yards of icy hill running by your place.



If you can't fish, you might as well have some fun. My thanks to Mary for holding on to the camera with one hand, sort of, and trying to hold on to me with the other. She's a trooper.