Weekend Catfish Report...

Once again we have the weekend catfish report. It's a bit slow this late summer and we have been fishing the Hanks Creek area for several years now without moving around too much.  In the past with hot temperatures and dropping lake levels we have moved south of the 147 bridge and that is the plan for the next trip. On this trip we managed 17 cats with lots of undersize throw backs. 

Me, Cathy and Matt cooked those fish right up having them hot on the table mere minutes after cleaning. You can't get fish fresher than at my house. Here is a photo of the products I use. I just opened that big jar of meal. I had the bright idea to date it but I wrote the wrong month with the intention to see how long it lasts. It claims to cook 27-32 pounds of fish. 

So far an early count shows us having caught 550 catfish with 9 pounds being the largest for the year. Probably if you add in pond fishing, panfish, them old green sunfish and catch and release days we are well over 600 total. People ask me all the time for the next big fish fry but it's not happening. We might have frozen 5 pounds of fish and we have either given away everything else, traded it for fresh vegetables or cooked it and ate it soon as we could without freezing. With Covid 19 precautions we have closed the fishing/party circle to family only. 

Oh yeah, I almost forgot, you need another photo of Cathy and catfish.  

Wind was light and breezy making the August day on the water very pleasant. I see in some of the internet fishing reports some lakes have crowding problems. I'm not seeing it in the spots I fish. It was pretty quiet on the lake yesterday and just about perfect.  

Next trip we will fish the Amber Forest area of the lake. It's a place that looks wide open but dropping lake levels should revel lots of treacherous stick up with more right under the water. That's ok, stick ups mean tie ups near drop offs and channels making easy fishing for the pontoon boatman.  

 

Hope You Are Happy...

 As I scan social media I noticed that some thought it was real funny to make jokes about shooting others who were protesting, demonstrating, rioting, whatever you want to call it. It happened so I hope you are happy. The jokes and insensitivity helped make a man feel this was OK. 

I'll go on record here by saying that if you have these beliefs that it's alright to take up a gun and kill or joke about killing or publicly advocate killing I'm against you. Life is sacred from the womb to the tomb and if you think anyone needs killing you need to think again.  

Late Summer Fishing Report...

Before I retired I fished a lot during the week because I worked a lot on weekends. Now I find myself fishing weekends since that's when family and friends are available. With late summer and warm temps  the crowds on the lake are a bit smaller than in the early summer months but I still find the parking at the boat ramp crowded enough that I count walking up the ramp to a distant space my retired guy exercise for the day. 

Here Matt and Morgan throw cast nets at the boat dock. I can make an educated prediction from previous experience and tell you that if shad and big red horse shiners are bunched up on the concrete boat ramp or cruising the sandy bottom next to the dock the cats will be shallow and the floating noodle fishing will be good. I think they captured one bait by net. We headed out to fish deep.  

I would say that the cats have been a bit slow this summer. In addition to catching them Matt picked up this nice schooling bass and Morgan hooked a few throw backs. They were hitting the old reliable Hot Spot with lots of schooling shad over the deep open water.  

I guess we need a first aid kit for the boat. This is Cathy's blood from a very minor scape that left no damage but much to Ezra's consternation produced a lot of blood. You should have seen the outside of the boat. There was more down the side there. 

Final count 18 cats and bass. 

 

Things and People I Have Lost or Can't Find....

I was pretty sure I made a blog post some years ago on the time we saw George Clinton and Funkadelic at the Republic New Orleans in, of course where else but New Orleans. I distinctly recall posting a photo of  Diaper Man as he played his guitar and I can't locate it anywhere in the cyberspace and in fact as if it would help I am reading the sci Fi novel by William Gibson, "Neuromancer" written in  1984 where the term cyberspace was first introduced. That has not helped either with the fact that I can only remember the first name of one person in this old photo of me, the second tuba from the left marching with the Stephen F. Austin State University Band some time between the years of 1975-78.    

Way back in those years I hit it off real well with a young black man whose real name I cannot recall (I'm writing all this down as fast as I can before I forget more) but preferred the nickname JT. JT was also a tuba player and an East Texan from a now renamed high school. We became good college band buddies. 

One day JT invited me over to his apartment to listen to music. Music was a bond, being the reason we were both at school. I accepted and after classes we headed to his place. JT began spinning records and he liked his music really loud. I mean really loud. In those days the speakers to stereos were big, I mean really big. None of this blue tooth stuff. Seems I remember hearing albums that had fantastical covers of aliens and space ships while incenses and stuff  burned. I think back and that music was probably George Clinton.

Now these old efficiently apartments were pretty shabby with paper thin walls and lots of students living there. I had also been living at places like this and had occasionally had to discuss such behaviors as loud music with the authorities. And it was East Texas. A white guy and a black guy listening to wild tunes in an apartment in the middle of the afternoon was pretty edgy but JT was fearless and I guess we were invisible that day. No one seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.  

The old George Clinton record Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow is 50 years old this year. I'd like to think it's one we listened to that day because that's sort of what happened to me. Though I soon left college and lost track of JT I wish there was some way to look him up. I'd ask if he still had those speakers, if he still had those records and if he ever got kicked out of those apartments. 

You can put on Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow and dance and burn incense to the song of that same name. But I'd like you to put on the record and listen to this song and think. The words and the message come near the end so feel free to skip on to it. Not everyone has the patience or time these days to sit in an apartment listening to music you have never heard before.     

 

    

 

Fishing Report...

What the world needs now is another picture of Cathy with a catfish. I should go through the archives and count how many photos there are like this, audit these fishing reports for the total number of cats caught each year and come up with some kind of percentage ratio comparing pictures to numbers and a formula like x divided by y equals mean results squared. Wait a minute, that's math! Let's fish!

Fishing was a bit slow on a 100 degree afternoon. With a swim and a cool south wind we did not suffer and in about two hours of fishing ended up with 8 cats, which we took right home and fried up. It was the perfect amount for the two of us. 

Usually the spot we are fishing is highly productive late summer through January. It's deep water, with even deeper water nearby. There have been a couple of times when we have come out to find others on our spot this summer and that's ok, I have other spots but there seems to be a reduction, not some much as in numbers but in the size of the fish. I'll be poking around on the next few trips trying to find the next hot place   

I made this cormorant photo  It was with the zoom lens so really not very close to where I was fishing but he was enjoying the sun and wind to dry his feathers. If you check the LAKE LEVEL on this interactive graph you with see that on May 29th this stump was under 6' of water. By doing a little math (oh no) this stump was just barely under the water on Aug. 6th just right for catastrophic boat hull damage. You can be your Zebco there are many more just under the water in this photo. 

Personally I like when this stuff starts sticking up because it is usually on river and creek drop offs and there be fish in these type of places. A modern invention you find on bass boats these days is the spot lock trolling motor. A GPS unit (some math again) will keep the tolling motor making minute adjustments so that your boat stays right on the spot and all you do is fish. I don't have this so I still operate by tying up to stumps and bushes (my dad used to ask me when we did this "do you see a snake, a wasp nest, all with great urgency") hauling on anchor ropes or judging the wind to make a good drift over a prime area. 

Fishing will probably pick up, I'll find a new spot but keep a watch for stumps and leave the math at home.    

 

Three in One Fishing Report...

We made a quick visit to Rose, Tim, Warren and Coraline last week and spent an afternoon at Surfside Beach. It was not crowded and the water was clear. 

In fact all water conditions indicated that it was going to be a great fishing day but it probably was somewhere besides where we were. Water was clear, bait was plentiful with me catching enough finger mullet on my fist cast net throw to last the day and the current gentle enough for a #1 surf sinker to hold a long rod in place. Water was so clear that artificial baits looked colorful and wiggly enough that I thought about biting one of them. 

Saltwater fishing is often governed by the rise and fall of the tide, the salinity of the bay vs. beach and so on.  

Great swim day for the grandkids though. 

Coraline works on bait catching. A grandchild that can catch bait is almost as valuable as a working wife. 

Brown pelicans just offshore. Cathy says these were almost extinct on the Texas coast when she was young and she is always glad to see them. 

Saturday back at the ranch Morgan, Ali, Parker and Cullen came for a visit. Me and Morgan headed out with the canoe to B. A. Steinhagen and the Walnut Slough paddling trail for some hot bream action. They were still holding in the same spot I had caught them in mid June and they were eager. 

Here's a big red ear shell cracker. Most fish taken on the longer crappie slider "do nothing lure." A few were caught under a slip cork on crappie nibbles. Total number was 17 that were all big enough to fillet. I saw a recipe where you can boil bream fillets in crab boil then when you ice them it causes the meat to be firm like shrimp.  

Ezra and Parker inspect the catch. Ezra was real interested in the fish cleaning process. A grandkid that cleans fish is worth almost as much as a working wife. 

Yesterday we made it to our evening Ratcliff swim and there were a few more people there than normal mid-week but could not be called crowded by any stretch of the imagination. 

I caught one big bream and me and Mary both hooked bass that jumped at the side of the boat about head high on Ezra and I think one of them left him dripping with water.  

Mary lives the mom life. One hand paddling while the other keeps the three year old in the boat. 

What Cathy did at Ratcliff was hold Luca. Hope Luca retains memories of how good he slept on this trip. Mary will need a third hand to hold him in the boat next summer. 

A Ratcliff trip is all about timing. The closest Sno-cone stand closes at 8PM. 

 

It's Been Some Kind of Year...

The past year has seen me lose my mom and Cathy lose her dad. They are certainly missed but you know as life goes on your parents will pass. It's like they formed you and have now left you in charge. When your friends start to pass it feels a bit different. 

I received news from her husband Brad this morning that an old friend from college days at SFASU in Nacogdoches, Nydia, passed away this past weekend. I had known her since maybe 1976-77. As it often goes friendships weave around and go up and down but the past several years we have been back in contact and was texting with Brad a couple of weeks ago so communication and friendship were still being maintained. 

That's Nydia on the left, I think that's Suzi in the middle. Those big glasses got me guessing girl! I don't remember where or when of this photo. I called Suzi this morning to break the news. That's Peggy on the right. I have completely lost track of her. 

Reportedly Nydia has been writing this great long book where I'm a character in it. I guess I'll have to go on being my own character.  

I also received news and spent some time in conversation with Nydia and another old friend, Julie a few weeks ago about the passing of an old buddy, Dave. He had passed sometime last year. We always called Dave by the nick name of "Goofy Malone." You had to know him. Dave contacted me several years ago and we talked on the phone once but he gave me like a wrong phone number and email address and I could never contact him again. That's why we called him Goofy. Our friendship also dated back to the late 70s.  

I think I had known Dave when I lived in the dorm and then when me and some guys moved off campus to a trailer park I looked out the window and there was Dave right next door again. 

While our paths went different ways through the years I will always cherish those youthful times we spent laughing, drinking, listening to music and sharing dreams. There are parts of Nydia and Dave I carry and stories of them I still tell. I do these things because they were important to me. As our parents form us and leave us to the adulting our friends form parts of us that we must carry on in our spirit.