Canoeing East End Park...

Morgan and I made a trip yesterday to East End Park in Kingwood. It's a 15 minute drive from his house to this park on a fork of the San Jacinto River leading into Lake Houston. It's the last, biggest remaining Big Thicket Ecosystem type forest in Harris County. There are very nice trails that allowed us to make use of the canoe dolly to get to a launch point.  

It was a great paddle but we caught no fish. I guess you could count the net fulls of big hand sized shad that Morgan caught in a cast net. Texas Parks and Wildlife list fishing as fair to good and I quote the web site "in areas when habitat can be found." It lists blue cat as good fishing which I would guess that's what is eating those big old shad. By all reports there seems to be a decent white bass run up the river in spring time. The area we fished was mostly sand flats with a few islands.  

You drive down Kingwood Drive, enter the park and it's a wilderness with ducks, birds, deer and not too many people. We saw quite a few mallards pictured here, hear wood ducks and saw a variety of shore birds and a couple of deer in their red summer coats. There is a trail called Alligator Alley. Water is muddy. Quite of few boats of all sorts and jet skis passed running fast in the deeper channel on the way up river to a popular swimming sandbar.   

Look in the trees carefully and you see a washed up stranded boat. 

Little creek, quite deep we paddled up. 

More mallards. 

As I say our casting arms got good exercise and the pushing of the canoe dolly counted as my cardio. The morning spent with my son counted as my happy place. I live by a great lake but this little 150 acre park with the bustle of the city near by was a great Saturday morning get away.   

Fishing report...

I get my photo with a catfish. All cats caught 30-35 feet deep. Size is running small with a lot of throw backs and a final total take home of 31 that included 6 bream caught during a swim break on shore. 

Water is about 79 degrees and a good bit of the morning was calm and hot so the water felt good. 

A good deck hand that can hail on a rope like a sailor in a hurricane is a handy fellow to have on board. 

Got her pulled ashore! All that work he ate his weight in catfish and I think everyone else did also. Barely enough leftovers for a couple of catfish po boy samiches. 

Memorial Day Weekend Fishing Report...

Rose, Time, Coraline and Warren paid a visit for a fishing trip this Memorial Day Weekend. Total for the fish log was 32 cats caught from deep water. Ezra also joined his cousins for a day of fishing and swimming. I say a day, we rose at 7 and left the late by noon with a thunderstorm looming.   

Warren is getting to when he has the fishing business down. 

Cathy and Warren probe the depths for dinner. 

Water temps were 79 degrees, a little cool for me but not for some. 

Coraline and Warren swim. 

With the covid 19 thing there seem to have been lots of people out of their ordinary routine but with extra time to spend on the lake. I think I got the next to the last parking spot this holiday weekend with about 4 more boats lined up to launch as I parked. My dad used to say on holiday weekends, "Today's the day they paved the bottom of the lake with beer cans." 

Usually no one is near our fishing spot but today boats were sprinkled across the lake tied up at old dead trees all over. This was the nearest one and from the looks of their bent poles and the fact that everyone was standing up leads me to believe that they were on fish. 

The tub shot. These cats all hit the hot grease. The Saturday night fish fry may be on it's way to becoming an institution around here. 

Can You Guess Where This Is...?

Cathy grew up in Houston so this reminds her of how cities plan for green spaces to add quality of life for the citizens caught up in the rat race of crowded living. Places where you could be close to urban sprawl but still find bits of peace and quiet. Our little city of Lufkin is ever growing and we have places like that and even though we live in the country and spend a lot of time outdoors we often drive into town to use these places. Can you guess where these photos were taken. Hint, it's in the city limits. 

Here's Cathy in the sometimes I sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits pose. 

Deck with walk way overlooks a wet land full of frogs and minnows. Probably snakes and maybe the possibility of a few bigger fish. From the looks of the steep banks around the swampy area this might have been a real lake one time that is now traveling down the unstoppable path of geologic time. 

There is a covered pavilion with plenty of seating and park benches at strategic places all along the trail. Could use a few trash cans in the pavilion and dock area where the most people tend to congregate.  

No wimmin? Are they not allowed? Do I need to make the one I brought go back to the car? are these Covid 19 precautions finely going too far? 

I think this is for you to put your picnic lunch in so snakes, alligators and bears don't get it. 

Not many people about. I think we saw one party of three in the parking lot who had just concluded activity here, three others at a distance walking and as we left a party of half a dozen teens and young adults set out on a walk. Plenty of room to spread out and enjoy the outdoors.  

Win Some Lose Some...

It's not always fun and games around here. Sometimes it's fun but then the games always have a winner and a loser. This is a tale of my day to day entertainments and adventures at home in a time of Covid 19 and retirement. 

I had the big idea and it may happen that I would start one of those BANDCAMP pages and sell my songs for $1 a pop. I think I have a handful of tunes as good as anyone's. Who doesn't like mail box money? Even Trump is sending it out to people who have not even written a song. 

So yesterday day I start playing around with equipment, messing with sounds and stuff. I have one of those looper pedals where you step on a button and play something, it records and plays back and you can continue on in layering tracks with other instrument I guess infinitely. I get a tuba bassline laid down to a canned drum beat, got the electric guitar tone dialed in and I think, or I stink depending on how you look at it, that with a different mic I can get a better tuba sound. So I switch mics and then I can's make another loop for some reason. I chase gremlins checking connections, cords and so on for an hour. My wife says I have no trouble keeping busy retired and stuck at home. I don't find gremlin but I do spend another 30 minutes playing fuzzed out baritone guitar, which if that's not marked off your bucket list it needs to be seen about. 

The photo is of what started out to be a nice neat work area. Today I look at the looper and see a button pushed that don't need to be. Everything works and I see nothing about that button in the user manual. I play fuzzed out baritone guitar for 30 more minutes.       

With restaurants shut down I have noted from credit card statements that this was where I spent most of my money. Part of it was the nature of the beast while working. I worked days and Cathy works nights. Sometime we spent an hour or so together on work days and it seemed the best use of time was a quick eat out put before we went separate ways. 

I like to eat out but I do like to cook. We did get a take out sushi dinner for Cathy's birthday and we have about decided with my retirement to a fixed income that sushi might be our only eat out. When not playing fuzzed out baritone guitar I do have the time to cook and in the past my attempts at Mexican have been limited to tacos and fajitas. Yesterday I made Spanish rice and beef enchiladas. It came out like you might get at any place in town. We often ate a lot of Mexican, sometimes nine different restaurants in a row calling it a Novena, a prayer of sorts.    

I guess to put this thing to bed the tunes were not so hot but the enchiladas were great. Win, lose, fuzzed out baritone guitar, can you tell the difference?   

Quite Canoe Trip...

I thought for a moment that I was going to paddle in the Neches River Rendezvous this year. It's a group canoe paddle to draw attention to the preservation of the wild stretch of the river and I have been working every weekend it occurred since it's inception. It's canceled this year due to Covid 19 precautions. Maybe I'll use this as an incentive to keep in shape in my retirement so I'll be able to tolerate a 10 mile paddle next time they hold it. 

In the meantime I have Sam Rayburn Lake. I took a paddle yesterday morning and caught 2 bass and three bream. I did not write a report about last week's canoe because I caught no fish. I think that was the first time I have gone and not caught a fish on a canoe trip. I was fishing a big bunch of lily pads with one of those plastic frog baits but I did not hook any. Someone told me to properly fish a frog you need to not look at the frog when retrieving or smoke marijuana to slow down reaction time setting the hook. Either one of gives the fish time to crush down on the bait and for the weedless hook to take hold. Since I missed about six big blow ups it was pretty obvious I was using neither of these techniques.

All fish today caught on my old stand by the beetle spin. That's a Kentucky Spotted bass, 12 inches long and a legal fish since there is no size limit on them. They don't get a whole lot bigger. I though for a minute about how he would be blackened in the pan but I turned him back.     

Red eared sun perch. They other two bream I caught were bigger but I made his photo. I expected more of these but they seemed scattered with lots of short bites nipping the plastic tail. See hook reaction technique written about above. 

After fishing the pads last week with hydrilla patches in the open water where it was impossible to use anything but some sort of weedless bait this little creek was amazingly clear of weed growth and I saw only a bit of the giant salvina washed way back up in flooded timber. I am really surprised I have seen no alligators while on these quite paddles since it's fairly common to see them when running an outboard. 

I still have the canoe loaded in the back of the truck but the rain forecast for the next few days means fishing might be touch and go. I still have the canoe in the truck. One place I'll try soon is the Ellen Trout Lake at the Lufkin Zoo.  

What the World Needs Now is Another Catfish Report...

For the record, 2 grandchildren, 27 catfish caught deep and lots of fun. 

Ezra caught his first catfish with an impressive display of toddler focus that lasted all of three casts. He needed just a bit of help and wouldn't hardly fish after his accomplishment. The next light that needs to come on in his busy little brain is that you are supposed to catch as many as possible.  

Cathy scores a gaspergou. 

Morgan lands a nice white perch. 

Picture of catfish fillet right before it goes for a swim in the belly.  

More catfish taking a belly swim with Ali, Cathy and Parker. 

When you want it to sound different...

I don't know how this happened. I own an even dozen of various fuzz, overdrive and distortion pedals. 

Back in the good old days when I started out playing electric music you would meet up with some other guys in an old house somewhere or in someone's back yard and plug into some old Fender amps, sometimes two guys plugged into one amp if there were not enough to go round and we would wail away all night long playing blues, Buddy Holly, and Carl Perkins with the attitude of Jerry Lee Lewis. We did not know what a pedal was. 

Just in case you don't know what a pedal is the various circuits, and there are really not that many circuits in the world are how the bands you like created their sounds. Fuzz gets you the distorted singing tones of Hendrix who used the fuzzface type circuits, Pink Floyd is the Big Muff circuits. Overdrive puts you in the ball park of SRV blues sound and distortion is just generally the rock and roll guitar you have heard on many records. 

I guess this fascination with pedals I have cultivated is caused by the internet where you can go down the rabbit hole of how to get certain sounds and the electronic minutiae of transistors converting impulse to sound. 

Here's my latest favorite, purchased since the group photo was made. It's handmade by a guy probably working at his kitchen table who calls himself dongeomac and can be found for sale on the musical instrument internet market place called Reverb. He makes what you might call "tweaked circuits" based on older designs but his own twists added. I have three of his pdals. They can be unusual sounding, they are cheap and have a nice homemade look I like. This is a bass fuzz and it sounds so good on guitar I have not tried it on bass yet.       

This fuzz sounds good with my low pass modulation filter. We will get into modulation some other time. 

I guess to wrap all this up we will just say when you go down a road, it will take you there. 

Catfishing Report...

After reviewing the blog fishing reports for the past three years I determined that we did do not fish much in May. Seems a lot of that time has been spent at music festivals. There are no music festivals right now, so we fish. The details from the reports show that we have sometimes caught them shallow and some times deep in May.

We chose to fish deep and put 20 cats in the boat. Here's a live well photo that shows how happy they all are when Carl and Cathy take them home. 

We hit a few spots thinking we might get in some light tackle pan fishing but Cathy only caught this one big bream. 

We got home and had a social distance catfish fry and jammed on guitars a bit with the Zamoras and Anne in attendance. All those catfish in the photo. They are swimming in our bellies.