Monday Morning Feel The Heat? Need The Voltaren!
You know you’re off to a rough start when your back hurts enough that you are laying on the floor, and begging your wife to run her walker up and down your back.
It’s not quite that bad, but the home life can really, really dial one down … to the point where a five mile cross-city bike ride leaves an impression for hours and potentially days.
The timing of being indoors in Texas is feeling perfect. The heat has become what it always does – a burning oven where the sun broils my skin if the sun barely hits it. This week is supposed to deliver the heat down the middle, finally breaking a hundred and tailing humidity in its vapor trail.
Suntanned speck caught on the Lower Laguna Madre this weekend – sent in by anonymous.
JUST THINKING
I have some time to “just think,” and it lead me to watch some mountain stream videos where some of those socialites (I suddenly like that word for these folks) with fly rods were chasing trout and the trout were eating hoppers. And I started thinking … dangerous I know … there’s slack in the leader for a drift, there’s the reaction time built into a topwater strike, and then there’s a variable I think may have a lot to do with topwater missed sets.
Monofilament leaders stretch. Granted, a fish can certainly hook itself, even with all the aforementioned odds in its favor, but how can one take back the one variable the floating, stretching monofilament leader? Is there a leader material that floats but doesn’t have the stretch?
All these variables amount to a second of time, more or less, but in case no one noticed? fish are pretty fast when faced with their own potential mortality. The advantage they take in such fractions of seconds, those are the advantages we seek to take away.
I will be giving this one some more thought. God knows I have the time! July is such a bittersweet month on my calendar, and up to now, this July follows that pattern better than most of the last few Julys on MY digital calendar.
THE WEEK AHEAD
It will be another week of indoor A/C and, fingers crossed, I just hope our forty-year-old A/C unit can hold up to the week ahead. Although the videos from Camp are exponentially less popular than fish porn, they will have to do. Work is spreading across no less than three YouTube Channels now, and the variety of the other two channels (other than fly fishing), has a strong smell of fly fishing crossover – photography and a new cycling hub for newcomers to the little City of Denton, Texas.
REMINDER – It’s time to slow those retrieves way down – as the water heats up even more this week. Expect lethargic action, with fish going “Roberto Duran” now. The last time I was on local Ray Roberts, the water was 83-degrees at the surface, so we can look for 90-degrees in about a week … a steam bath.
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