Last Catfish of the Year...

Me and my son Morgan along with Roses's kids Warren and Coraline mad it out for the last catfish trip of the year. Catch was 13 fish with me scoring a 4 pound blue for the best fish. We spend about two hours fishing. Due to the cold temps Cathy stayed home with Parker. 

It was just below freezing when we woke but had probably made it to a little warmer temp by the time we made it too the lake but I think these two get an honest polar bear badge for the cold run across the water on a blue bird day. 

Morgan catches a nice blue. 

Me with my big blue. Lucky I had a couple of swampers to help with the net. 

Generally nice keeper sized fish today. 

Soon as I can go through the fishing log I'll get up a count for total fish caught this year.

Plastic Worm Fishing...

I have gone through a fixation of fishing for about every species of fish, at least the local ones. My dad liked to bass fish and usually we were chunking and winding hard baits. Every now and then some one that liked plastic worm fishing might take us somewhere and say toss that worm in there, they will take it and we did ok. The plastic worm was not usually my first choice and with the focus on the catfish game the past few years my bass fishing skills have eroded a bit but yesterday I caught them on the worm.  

I was canoe fishing, small water, skinny water fishing on Sam Rayburn. I had a few half hearted strikes at a spinner bait but seemed nothing really wanted to bite hard. I switched to the purple flake Zoom worm shown here, fished it weightless and they hammered it. No a lot of big fish and in fact this photo of a 15 incher is the only keeper size but what fun. I think maybe one of the factors that helped the worm presentations was that I was using an old 1970s Diawa spin casting reel that did not have a high enough gear ratio to keep a Hot Spot lure out of the grass but took in line at just the right speed to creep a wiggly worm along. 

I really love a canoe trip in winter. If there has been low rainfall totals with no run off the water is crystal clear. In fact I think in the right lower part of the photo you can see the hydrilla beds. Water was 3-4 feet where I found fish with a foot or so of growth. Bass fisherman like hydrilla. It's good for the fish and I think this past spring the lake was so high that the beds did not receive enough sunlight to thrive. If we don't flood looks like the weed will be back. 

I have mixed feelings on hydrilla. Sometimes for shallow water catfish it will clog the pockets next to the brush and I can't get my bait on the fish. If I find a sandy bottom hole I can present the bait there and the fish find it. Just a little different technique. Most of fishing is boat positioning and where you put the lure. 

Hopefully we can get one more catfish report in before the end of the year.   

Things Pile Up...

I like to call myself a collector. Some might say pack rat. Others might say ferocious consumer of more than his fair share. Whatever you may think my collections are usually music related and I think maybe I have moved on from the cheap Chinese made distortion pedal fetish but now I'm into mouthpieces.

When I was a young tuba player I did not think much about mouthpieces. I maybe thought about my mouthpiece because back in those teen age monkey business years it was not uncommon to prank a mouthpiece of even your best buddy. I just did not think much about mouthpiece brands. A mouthpiece came with your horn and you used it. It might be tarnished, chipped and have an out of round shank but it was usually good enough for the fat boys with the big horns on the back row. 

Now, with the internet information expressway it's possible to know or maybe find out what opinions people have of all kind of things like distortion pedals and mouthpieces. As you could spend hundreds of dollars on these items all this available info makes me kind of find my own way to go. 

Starting on the from row right dead center is a bugle mouthpiece flanked by two trumpet mouthpieces. The bugle seems to have a dirt dobber nest in it because it's been hanging out in the garage draped with Mardi Gras beads since some Mardi Gras Party. I happen to have a couple of unplayable non working trumpets that belong with the other pieces, which are good quality mouthpieces made by the Bach Company in the USA. The one on the right can be used with the alto horn. 

Second row are the baritone mouthpieces. Could also be used on trombone. On each end are two Kelly pieces made from lexan. You can get them in about any color you want and I bought the gold sparkle when Miguel gave me a thrift store baritone. It's not a real deep cup so this tuba player, used to a big cup was having some trouble. I then bought the red which was a little deeper. Then last week my friend George, your friends may notice when you are collecting before you do, gave me the metal Schilke. It's a good quality piece, made in the USA with a deep cup and it has really help me step up my baritone game. Thanks, George. 

And last but not least we come to the tuba. In the middle of the back row is the mouthpiece that came with my tuba. It's a Bach and brand new one would cost $90. It is probably not anywhere near as old as my made in 1936 tuba but somehow it came to not satisfy me so I began buying the lexan Kellys which are copies of more expensive models and can be had for about $33 or cheaper if on sale. This fact gives you a chance to try out a lot of models you might not be able to afford. The white one is too small but plays well in the upper register and the green and clear are pretty all purpose but my current favorite is the purple one on the right. these are made in Wisconson and one of their benifits is that they play better in cold weather outdoors than metal. 

I know this is way more indepth information than many may need but things just seem to go better with a good mouthiece, a cheap distortion pedal and if you at least try to explain yourself. 

   

The One That Got Away...

Nine is an important number. The Beatles had a song called Revolution #9. A posthumous Jimi Hendrix album (Jimi was making money he couldn't spend) was called Nine to the Universe. I know from our own personal experience of studying Korean Martial Arts that they thought 9 was the perfect number. And to put a fine point on this, Saturday morning Cathy caught a 9 pound 10 ounce catfish.  

What is also remarkable is that she hooked a fish that she could not turn back to the boat on the cast before this one. We are guessing something quite a bit bigger as Cathy's gear has put fish to 10 pounds in the boat easily. The biggest fish were coming off the bottom in 33' of water. 

Matt lands a nice blue. 

I get a pretty good one. 

Another shot of the big one on the cleaning table. Those other fish ran right at 3 pounds so that's 6 fish totaling a little over 20 pounds. All total we had 43 catfish. 8 pounds of blue cat fillets and 8 pounds of channel cat fillets.  

One more shot of big boy. He swam in our bellies not long after this photo. 

For you bird watchers we saw the first migrating pelican from the Great Lakes region. More will follow. 

Looks like this crew of pot likkers, pirates and nere do wells plan on a Christmas day catfish trip. We will see what kind of presents Santa leaves under the tree stump. 

Live Music...

This weekend saw a performance by singer songwriter and Grammy nominee  Eliza Gilkyson at The Live Oak Listening Room. It was maybe the third time I have seen her play and you have to wonder, even though she is critically acclaimed and plays about 150 shows a year, why she is not a bigger star. Her songs are about love, politics, spirituality, ecology and many more topical subjects that at this time in the world we should hear more about.

She comes by this talent honestly as you have probably heard a song her father, Terry Gilkyson composed. It was in the Disney film The Jungle Book. The song was "The Bare Necessities" and it lost out on the Academy Award for best movie song to "Talk to the Animals" which was in Dr. Doolittle.     

Often time the heroes we admire are not good people. Cathy could not make the show because of work. When I told Eliza how much my wife liked her music she autographed this CD to her. Pure class. 

Out of Many, One...

On a recent muggy fall day I took the opportunity to dive about 45 minutes from my house to the Seaman's Cemetery outside of Chester, Tx to look where various Wallace kin are laid to rest. It's a quite place, back off the road and I would not mind being there myself.  

I found plenty of ancestors and relations here. As you might expect from the name of the place there would be some Seamans here and there are along with a couple of other reoccurring names. I found about three rows of my people much like the foremost row you see here. They are all laid out together. I would guess close knit from the looks of things and I would imagine that in town there are probably still plenty of them. Makes me wonder how my grandfather, Sam got all off by himself over in Lufkin and I grew up with little knowledge of these folks.   

Out of many there is one. That's what his name means. Here is the tombstone of my great great grandfather E Pluribus Unum Wallace. Plu, born in Mississippi in 1853 is known to have been in Texas at age 19 in 1879, along with the rest of the family in a place the census calls subdivision 21, Polk, Tx. His occupation is listed as farm labor. The almost faded away inscription reads "An honest man is the noblest work of God"

Here's Plu's father and Mother, William Columbus and Theresa. Old WC, my third great grandfater was born in Monticello, Ga famous for a lynching of four black people in 1915 and Theresa was born in South Carolina. They met up and married in Leake, Mississippi. Looking it up the place is still described as quite rural and is still pretty much segregated with the whites going to private schools and any other color in public school. 

This looks like a modern headstone and I would imagine it replaced the original.  

Not sure who this is, maybe a third great uncle or the son of a great uncle. I was curious about the handshake that has one finger out. Lot of these guys were Masons and I though maybe a secret handshake but as far as I can find yet it does not seem to be associated with them. 

A child. I'm guessing a great grandson of WC. 

Charlie Lee. One of Sam's brothers. I found his WW1 draft card online which includes a physical description of short and stout. His death certificate lists him as a single, unmarried cabinet maker. 

There is a family story that I have heard from two relatives about a Wallace, thought to be a woman buried outside the cemetery fence. Now there is probably someone alive today in Chester, Tx that could fill in the details but speculation is that someone, maybe Charlie had a woman of color. Again speculation is that it was an Indian woman. Now I did not exactly find a grave outside the fence but I did find this stone, blank or worn away lean up against the fence with a mound of earth behind it in the woods. I don't know if this means anything  as there was a badly faded stone belonging to a Seamans, the namesakes of the cemetery also leaned on the fence. Who knows? Maybe I get this all written out it will lead me to an answer so I'll have to correct some of my speculations here. 

So where does this take us? Our time, my time is always marching closer. As we occupy that time we find a place to be in it. A place for myself.