Old Rickety Back

Another season ended a little early as a result of my back going out on me.  I was close to calling it quits, anyway.  We had a pretty good second half to our 2011 season on the Grand.  The kids came out a few more times and Mort was finally able to hit the water with us.  The cats were pretty cooperative from August on.

My favorite trip since my last entry was probably an evening when Mort, Lincoln and I went out.  We covered close to 4 miles of river.  Lincoln was hauling in the suckers and other worm biters.  He gave old Mort a pretty good chuckle when he said, "Watch and learn, Grandpa" every time he pulled one in.  He gave him another chuckle when he insisted that he had to poop and then only popped out a tiny tootsie-roll after I got him all set up on a bucket.  We struggled to find the cats for a little bit that night, but the channels eventually showed up.  After dark we parked at the head of the hole just down from the launch.  We caught several fish, including one decent flattie.  I got to play guide, setting the hook and then quickly handing the rod over.  Lincoln wanted his grandpa to tell him story after story.  10:30 rolled around and I suggested that we head in.  Neither of them wanted to.  Might be the first time ever that I was outlasted on the river.  My early end to the season left Mort wanting more.  We're both eagerly anticipating the spring run of channels down by the bayous.

I spent one rainy Sunday with the boys down river by Indian Channel.  We brought crawlers and frozen cut sucker in hopes that we'd get into some fall channels.  Didn't really happen.  The rods with the cut bait danced constantly.  Just little jiggles.  Switching to a worm and a small hook revealed that the bottom was just crawling with tiny channels.  It worked out well for the boys.  They got to reel in fish after fish.  When they grew tired of it, we decided to try drifting for walleye.  We stumbled across one.  Luke was worried about getting poked and I could barely get him to hold it for a picture.  Ended up yelling at him a little bit.  I got a pouty picture for my effort.  We also snuck a decent bass into the boat on a drift.  It was pretty apparent that the boys were pretty done with fishing by this time of the year.  They were loud, silly, and almost constantly arguing with each other.  I about lost my mind out there.  The good thing about fishing is that Luke will only bring away from all of this the ability to brag to people that he has caught his first walleye.

I also got out by myself a fair share.  The flatheads started coming into the boat pretty regularly in August and September.  They just about exclusively came on sucker heads.  Live bait was completely useless, especially in September.  Other pieces of cut bait always seemed to get snubbed in favor of the head.  Hard to make any sense of it, but I'm glad I made this discovery.  One final thought about fall fishing that I've always liked.  It obviously gets dark a lot earlier.  The flatheads get aggressive for an hour or two right around dusk.  You can really pinpoint your attack and then head for home before you would normally even be starting on a mid-summer outing.  It's a nice first step towards getting back to something a little closer to normal sleep.

I thought that I had my CPR photography down to a pretty flawless science.  I ran into a new problem in that I just couldn't keep the fog off of the lense.  You can barely see the biggest fish of the year because of a blurry lense.  I didn't discover the problem until after I had released the big girl.  Even after I accounted for the fog and started wiping the lense just before my pictures, I still had issues.  I think that there's some kind of anti-fog spray that I can get for this.  What a pain!

Right now I'm sitting smack in the middle of that lull between the river and ice fishing.  I've already pulled out a couple of my ice fishing DVD's.  I'm very much looking forward to seeing that first flag pop.  I do have to prepare for the fact that I won't be getting out as much this winter.  The wife and I are trying to account for the tough financial times and cut down on cost any way possible.  Extra gas money and minnows can be pretty hard to add to the budget when you've already cut things like cable and about 10 degrees off your heat.  I'll just have to make the times that I do go count.  Maybe she'll let me keep going if I can turn each trip into a meal or two.  As my old buddy John used to say, I'm always thinking.