Monday Morning Sidewalk Thanksgiving Week 2016
Good morning and welcome to the Monday Morning Sidewalk! Your week is probably a bit shorter this week, as the Thanksgiving holiday steps up and sticks a flag in the pile that says, “THE YEAR IS ALMOST OVER!” and what a year … what a year.
There is a retrospective on the menu for release this week. It’s a video piece interwoven with still photos and video from the epic year that is 2016. It obviously comes from my personal perspective and contains some very personal raw footage from a long term project I have been working on this year. Call it a sneak peak if you want (a sneak peak on something that may never be completed, and nobody will probably ever see!). This behemoth of a video runs twenty minutes, so make sure you’ve had your spiked eggnog before you sit down in your lazy chair for this one!
WHEN BLACK FRIDAY COMES
As far as the fly fishing in Texas is concerned, we always want a significant cold front to trigger the flounder run on the coast of Texas, and we did have one pass through late last week. It’ll be up to you scouts on the coast to hit the places like Sea Wolf Park in Galveston, Texas, and let us know if those fantastic flatfish are there! If you are looking for flies to catch flounder, be sure to contact me – I am in the process of tying a few right now.
The North Texas scene actually shifts to another state now. I haven’t been a huge fan of the trout scene in Oklahoma in recent years, but the personal economics are such that it makes a lot of financial sense to focus more intensely on the Blue River catch-and-release area as well as focusing on the rediscovery of Beaver’s Bend, Oklahoma. The stocking budget in Oklahoma seems pretty significant, and unless we have unseasonably warm or ice storms that stop the trucks, you can count on (what appear to be) very organized scheduled stocking of these entirely synthetic fish in that State.
And for Texas synthetic fish, of course it is impossible to beat the Guadalupe River’s trophy trout stretch. I am not up to speed on the productivity there, but now that you have some time off, maybe you can hit us with information about that Texas trout fishery.
There are still chances for 1) smallmouth bass at Texoma, 2) frisky bass making their last shallow move, and, 3) topwater striper action on Texoma and some other places. You can also find action below dams (that are releasing water), like Possum Kingdom and I imagine there’s some real potential at Denison Dam and possibly the Brazos below Lake Whitney. It’s these cold snaps that get me thinking about chain pickerel at Daingerfield, and make me wish for the good-old-days of coal (yeah right), and the cooling lakes like Monticello. Lake pickin’s are just slimmer these years.
NOVEMBER 22
Tomorrow is especially significant for this part of Texas, as well as the Nation. It’s the 53rd. anniversary of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, Texas, and if you are interested in a little piece of history related to that, check out an old video – https://youtu.be/JOUW3Vnnx2o . The last time I saw the person in this video, he had suffered a debilitating stroke and was living in an assisted living situation in a nearby town. IF you ever have the time, the School Book Depository Sixth Floor Museum is well worth the visit.
Thanks for reading, and have a great week. Love your family and enjoy the moments of the week ahead. Hit the water on Black Friday, and let us know how it goes! I’ll do the same.
Category: Adventure, Backcasting, Complimentary Reading, Culture on the Skids, Fishing Reports, Saltwater Fly Fishing Texas, Writing
