Monday Morning Sidewalk – How About a New Can of Worms?
HOT-HOT-HOT
Welcome. It is one hot, or as the Donald would say hot-hot, Monday morning. We’ll be putting together a chain of 100-degree days that will take us all the way through this week and most certainly have an effect on fly fishing here in North Texas.
The heat’s nothing new for this time of year, and if it doesn’t keep humans inside (if you are as dumb about fishing as me), then you will be looking for fish that are smarter than us, and trying to escape the hot water that comes this time of year. Your clock needs adjusting.
It’s time to change your clock to “fish-bite savings time,” and that means we’ve got to get out early or late when fish are more likely to be active on any endeavor we are looking to undertake for the duration, or until another extraordinary weather event that cools things off here in Texas (can you say hurricane?).
Lately, I have been having a complete blast chasing sand bass, by the acre, on Lake Ray Roberts in the evenings. The heat of the day is broken, and there’s just something “oceanic” about looking for huge schools on wide open water, chasing them down and catching on each, and every, cast.
Saturday, on Lake Ray Roberts, was no exception. I was out working on a series of photographs for TPWD Magazine, and after doing the shore photographs, I decided to hitch up the boat and capture some image from the water. It provided a fantastic perspective … on the crowds of hundreds of people who were at the parks on Ray Roberts Saturday. (As regular readers may recall, I have a policy against getting near these lake populations on the weekends, but that’s exactly what these photographs called for.)
I was crossing the east side, from Jordan launch to Johnson Branch, when I suddenly realized I was running over small groups of small sand bass marauding off the point of the park. So, I shut her down, and up they came by the thousands. I took a short wind drift, caught fish on every cast, left them hungry, and took off to finish the photography.
I came back to them later and they were still going strong. Conventional fishing gear will fill your YETI cooler if that’s your thing, but no matter what, you’re better off getting way deep – below the schoolies that will nab anything off the top twelve inches. And if you have a trailer on your spoon, even a simple trailer on a spoon — you can expect to catch two at a time.
THE WEEK AHEAD
It’s off to Houston to pick up a load of “stuff” to refurbish and sell – as I build the junkyard business. And while there? It just so happens that Danny Scarborough www.houstonflyfishing.com is into catching one of the funkiest freshwater fish swimming in Texas. He’s been guiding folks for bowfin somewhere around Houston, and I just have to get a little of that prehistoric, slithery action.
BODY-MIND-SOUL
The annual reminders are popping up on my calendar now. (Yes, I do annual alarms for things other than fly fishing HOTSPOTS long past) I am already starting to pass through my first anniversaries of the cavalcade of medical diagnoses that brought living to a halt to preserve life. To say I am frustrated with recovery (on all fronts), and the slow progress today … would be a gross understatement.
I came across a movie the other night, on some obscure channel, on Levon Helm, called
“Ain’t In It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm,” and I was mesmerized. For those of you who don’t know my addiction to great music has been going about 42 years now, and Levon Helm finished his run on earth with some of the greatest music I have ever heard.
Anyway, the combination of seeing Levon Helm in a doctors office, getting that same probe (I had) stuck up his nose to look down his throat – to look at his throat cancer, did something to me. Actually, that movie did a few things. First, I was able to finally listen to Levon again which had been too painful until now — now I feel his pain. Second, I decided to take a more active, some would say militant, stand on the need for todays youth (those in the correct age range) to be vaccinated against the HPV virus (some of you I know, who have children, got my e mail), and finally; it gave me the push I need to start talking about the blatant and obvious need to legalize marijuana now – across the board, but at the very least medicinally in Texas. There will be those of you who disagree with the last realization, and I am here to tell you I was with you (who disapprove of cannabis) until very recently. Heck! I even had to check how to spell “cannabis” in that last sentence! I am living in a whole different world now. For those of you who don’t see how this relates to fly fishing? Stick around, I’ll explain.
For those of you riding along this eight-year-old road, I hope you are still enjoying the ride. Based on the previous paragraph, I can see that it is impossible to “avoid the bleed” of one subject into another. Perhaps it was the original intent of including “fly fishing music,” or the more recent addition of talk about “BODY-MIND-SOUL” of a fly fisher that put the crack in the door for these new topics to enter, but whatever it was, here we are.
Category: Body-Mind-Soul, Causes, Complimentary Reading, Culture on the Skids, Fishing Reports, Hot Spot, Life Observed, Movies DVD Video, North Texas
