Happy New Year everyone!
I'll say 2022 was a good one and we look forward to more. Not going to get another outing with Matt, but I will try to fish a river pretty soon. Not sure what's going to happen with ice.
Matt and I will try to install a new motor for my Minn Kota Endura 55 this evening. Then Sunday he flies back to California. Hoping the best for TAE Technologies and nuclear fusion.
It's not six pounds. DSLR cameras are truth tellers. Mobile device cameras are magic. I believe there are people who think that brown is pushing eight pounds. I never said how big it is on Facebook. The laker--Matt's first and only--in the photo below is one inch shorter in length. True, it weighed a lot less. But the brown is only four pounds, 12 ounces on my Rapala electronic scale. And only 23 inches long.
Look how colorful that mobile device shot. Is it really that vivid out there?
We got to the Sporting Life around 9:20, and after we parked in Lot 2, some guy was walking out with a brown of about 20 or 21 inches. Said his buddy had a nice rainbow on Power Bait. Well, that fish wasn't much over 15 inches, but they had got there around 8:00 and enjoyed a bite.
Matt and I waited hours. We fought the cold. Had a propane hand warmer that helped, too. Matt did miss a hit on Power Bait. Actually, the line broke on hookset. One rod was baited with the stuff.
Then, around 2:00, I walked to the car to get a stringer, just in case. Take home some lakers for dinner. I ran into someone in orange weather overalls on the road who said I looked familiar, so I told him my first name.
"You knew me when I was a little kid," he said.
He looked to be about 21. "You were the kid who caught that two-foot-long rainbow," I said. This back around 2014 when I was a lunch hour regular.
"Yeah!" he said.
Nick seemed to bring the fish in, because once he was there fishing with us, action began. He fished a Binsky and did catch a laker before the park closed at 4:00. I caught a little one of about 15 inches, and another 20 1/2. Besides the two trout Matt caught, he missed yet another hit on Power Bait. He could have caught a "trifecta"!
Why push one's luck? Ask for too much, and next time you'll be ignored. Why is a "trifecta" so special, anyhow? Especially after one's had a day as great as we enjoyed today.
I seem as if I'm a little superstitious about things, but basically, I notice patterns as they unfold. I didn't actually dream up Matt's brown, but why daydream unless to prepare for an event? You even keep it cool by not dreaming the unlikely, so you get just the amount that's reasonable without pushing your luck and making your daydream feel "off" instead of somehow spot on.
It's daydreaming but rational judgment.
I stood next to one of my rods. I had got a really good cast with it back around 9:45. I stood there and went back and forth in my mind for three or four minutes over whether to reel in the shiner, make sure it's still there, and recast perhaps somewhere else. Don't I seem like a dingbat unable to make up my mind? Doesn't outdoor pursuit require swift and decisive action? But three or four minutes is how long it took me to arrive upon being sure what to do about that rod. From within.
I was sure of leaving it be.
Five minutes later it leapt off the rock holding it off the gravel and sand. I hooked our first trout of the day. After all those frigid hours.
Imagine had I put that rod elsewhere. (It would have been "sensible" to do that.) That rod in the spot that caught all three lakers.
