Over and Over...

More proof I just keep doing the same old thing over and over. 

I loaded the canoe in the truck last night just so I wouldn't get lazy today and not go fishing. When I got up this morning I checked the fishing log and sure enough this day in 2020  I had about 20 big bream from the canoe trail area at Martin Dies Jr, State Park. I had decided on an afternoon trip so I played the tuba a bit, worked out at the water aerobics class and headed out.  

Fishing was not great today but I had fun. I caught several black bass too small for keepers, a beautiful too small crappie and a handful of bream. I think that mixed catch should count for some kind of Texas Grand Slam. 

Most of the fish were caught a trout magnet. I had picked up a thrift store tackle box for $5 that had one of these kits with jig heads, corks and tails all complete. One bass, a couple of inches shy of a keeper took an earthworm under a cork. I don't think I have caught a bass on an earth worm since childhood. 

The worms I gathered from the leaf mulch piles at home were not crowd pleasers. I caught a couple of fish on them but I did better with a yellow trout magnet fished under a cork. The lake at the State Park, B.A. Steinhagen, or what we used to call "Dam B" is a shallow body of water with lots of hydrilla, water hyacinths and giant salvina. Some of the floating mats get moved around by the wind covering favorite fishing areas and with warming water the weeds reach for the surface making it hard to fish ultra light jigs. You can paddle around tossing your bait in the holes in the vegetation but a throw an inch too far that hangs up can spook a spot where you are getting bites. 

I fished four hours and stopped for a standing break on the bank once. Back at the launch a young man paddled up in a short flat bottom boat from the opposite direction I had gone and I inquired about his luck. He said he caught 15 bass fishing since 10am but claimed he almost got too hot during those hours. I handled the heat pretty well but I note not being able to sit as long in the canoe and that will shorten my paddling career more than anything.  

There is not a size restriction on bream. In Texas you catch a bucket full and fry them up whole. They say Mississippi bluesman Howlin' Wolf could eat 50 bream at a sitting. I threw these fish back after the photo op because my baby would be all mad if she did not have 50 crunchy fried bream. 

I noted the Island trail, a good short walk for the grand kids is open but the other trail going the other direction is closed for work. I also saw plenty of the smaller green herons. I might hit Ratcliff for the next canoe adventure since it's getting hotter and the swimming area there is very handy. I've done that lake plenty of times and look forward to again.   

     

 

   

 

Canoe Trip...

Milo was after me everyday last week with the cry, "I want to go fishing!" Heck I did too but sometimes you just get caught up in doing those big people things and neglect other things but I finally found a day to load the canoe and head over to Martin Dies Junior State Park for some fishing along the paddling trails on B.A. Steinhagen Reservoir.  

We only caught a couple of small bass but I think Milo was more interested in loading, unloading, dragging to and from the water and the strapping for transport of the canoe. That's OK, we all have our gifts and if we get through those terrible twos looks like hard work will be one of his. 

I have had some world class bream fishing along the trails but seemed like the lake was just a little low and that made it hard not to snag the small 1/32 ounce swim jigs the panfish like so well in the mats of hydrilla. I think fish were present and maybe sometime I'll take a cane pole and drop a bait in the openings instead of dragging weeds. 

There was plenty of bird watching and though the lake is loaded with gators we did not see any. Of course that does not mean they did not see us.  

 

I did scope out some of the camp sites as I usually camp at this lake in the other unit on the other side of the lake and I noted easy access to a part of the creek I usually don't fish so I'll keep that in mind. 

A Canadian Fishing Report...

My home lake, Sam Rayburn Reservoir is great fishing. It's so good that I am often not concerned with fishing anywhere else and I travel with a been there done that kind of attitude in regards to other water bodies. On our recent trip to Canada visiting Lake of the Woods and staying with my daughter and family at their cabin produced some good fishing for a first visit to the area and had us enjoying several tasty fish dinners. 

Seems that the lake is home to 70 species of fish with most anglers chasing muskie, walleye, smallmouth and largemouth bass, northern pike, lake trout and even crappie in spring. I won't get into the ice fishing side of things but I saw many anglers using familiar tactics and lures and once when passing close to a guide boat I saw paddle tail plastics nearly a foot long tied on their rods. I don't know what they were after but we caught smallmouth, Walleye and northern pike. 

Cathy caught this walleye on a Chartreuse curly tail jig with a 1/4 head. I had one walleye break my line at the dock and another that spit the hook back at me. If you heard walleye is tasty you heard right. 

I managed to catch 5 smallmouth and one throw back, all on a yellow curly tail jig. All fish caught from the dock except one caught from a paddle boat. We had a motor boat as well as canoes and kayaks available but fishing was good enough from the dock and paddling is work. Later a couple of guys came by in a bass boat casting the shoreline just like in East Texas and they said they always hit our dock for a few fish. 

That's a northern Pike on the right and I caught him on the yellow curly tail when I cast it behind a family of half grown mallard ducks swimming along the shore. Later I visited a store called Canadian Tire which is kind of like our Tractor Supply but with an extensive fishing section and saw duck lures for $30. I had visions of grandchildren whipping the water to a froth and catching big bass but to buy each a duck lure would have set me back $270 Canadian which really would have been $196 USA but I decided against it. The curly tails worked too well and I got plenty of them. 

Hamish tries his luck from the dock. The kids caught lots of crawfish on hot dogs and in traps and I could see that Cathy wanted to use them for bait but the kids crawfish raced and when I cleaned the smallmouth their bellies were full of crawfish. Probably smuggle in one of my dad's old crawfish pattern Bomber crankbaits next trip. 

 

If you visit Lake of the Woods take a pole. 
   

  

 

          

A New Camera and a Fishing Report...

I went through a couple of those Canon point and shoot cameras and while I like them they don't stand up well to canoeing, duck hunting, catfishing and tuba playing for extended periods of time. It's usually the little accordion screen lens protector that goes and while that does not keep the camera from operation but without the lens gets scratched and photo quality suffers and we can't have that. For a while I have been using an old Kodak that seems indestructible but it's like stone age tech as far as digital stuff goes and makes the greatest tubing behind the boat photos ever but it has other shortcomings and Cathy has felt sorry enough for me to purchase a late Father's Day present, a Nikon D31000. It's used, bought from the Unclaimed Baggage website  and some might probably consider it old tech but it's the nicest camera I've owned. It lacks the zoom I'm used to but things far away are getting less and less important to me and on our fishing trip yesterday we took the first fish photos with it.    

Cathy with the first fish photo. She's seeing if the new Frida Kahlo bucket hat can catch fish. Lots of digital info on the photo file. I can tell by the upload speed compared to a cell phone pic but then some of ya'll might have a better phone camera than me.  

Grandson Warren has been staying with us all week. I know some of ya'll want AI but yesterday Warren learned where the long boat cut is and how to recognize it, how to ease the boat up to the dock and how to come around and stop for a swimmer in the water without running over them with the boat. If you don't need these skills pass on by. 

One of our favorite spots late summer through the winter is a stump that is on the edge of what I suspect is an old oxbow lake off the river channel that we named the dog walker because when we discovered it there was a dog leash tied to it. It was a poor producer last summer and on trying it this trip we found that it had been broken off (upper part is still held on short stump by the trotline string that is tied to every stump in the lake) but still had enough stump above the water for a tie off. The fish have returned and we had a good bite. 

I marked a GPS way point incase this stump breaks further and as long as my depth finder lasts longer than a Canon camera it is saved so I can remember it as WP025 so I can anchor and fish this spot. Big fishing secret revel: always tie to those stumps barely sticking out of the water. Human nature says everyone else is going to tie to the tallest stump. It's easy.  

Final count was 16 cats in less than an hour. Back of the boat where the transducer is said 39 ft with fish 4 reel turns up.  No great size but we could have had all we wanted. Cathy does not skin catfish anymore because of a shoulder replacement and arthritis and I told them I felt like I'd clean 20 today. They got pretty close.

Blue heron photo with head bent attending to his grooming as I learn to work the new camera. 

 

 

Neches River Fishing Report...

We made the trip to Chandler River Park on the Neches River to fish the white and yellow bass run. White bass were in short supply and we only caught a couple but the yellow bass, which have no size restriction or limit cooperated and in about three and a half hours or so we had supper.   

I can imagine this area could be crowded if the bite was on good for a weekend day but we were pretty much by ourselves at a favorite spot where we have caught these fish three years in a row now. We had pretty much stopped fishing and were sitting on a log eating lunch when a couple of guys came by and asked how we were doing and when we said a few they immediately stopped and started fishing. We had spread our chairs pretty wide on the bank taking up a lot of space so for a community hole like this I don't know which was the worst manners but since the bite had slowed we let them have it.  

I'd like to bring my canoe here sometime and I did talk to a kayaker who claimed it was the worst year in 30 years he has been fishing the spring run. I had seen some internet chatter that the yellow bass had taken over this part of the river. That's ok with me as the white bass is a bit of a course meat and I've eaten enough of that in my life and prefer the more panfish type quality of the yellows. We don't need a freezer full of these things. Nothing is fishier that a package of white bass fillets caught during the spring run thawed out for a 4th of July fish fry. I doubt the yellows would freeze well either.   

SOMEBODY said I looked like an old man in this photo. Maybe just a river rat. 

Thanks to my friend Quince who gave me a package of inline Mepps style spinners purchased off TEMU. I'd say they produced a dozen of these fish with second place going to the old favorite Roadrunner and third a simple ball head jig.    

Without the TEMU lures we would have had a nice fish fry for me and Cathy but with them we had enough fish to invite the Zamoras over. 

Yellow bass fillets makes an attractive plate. 

If you invite this crew you better have 21 fish. 

I also made a dew berry cobbler with a bag of berries the boys picked last spring and with the vines loaded with blooms I thought I better clear it out of the freezer. 

Sitting around the fire made everyone want smores. I passed on these but the warmth felt good. On a windy March day I don't think anything can be colder than sticking your hand in an ice chest full of white bass to fetch another fish to fillet. Somehow we will carry on.   

 

Ratcliff Lake Camping...

The very best song ever written is "I Heard the Voice of a Pork Chop" by Jim Jackson. Ratcliff Lake is a pretty good campground to sit around the griddle and let the bacon do the  singing. We had Warren and Coraline for a visit and stayed two nights, the Zamora family stayed one night and the Morgan and Ali family joined us for one day. We weathered a thunderstorm Saturday night staying nice and dry in the camper but power to the park went out the next morning so with my dependence on an electric coffee maker showing we packed it up and came home on Sunday.     

We called this place Camp Catawba Worm because my tree at home was covered with worms and we turned those worms into a fish dinner. 

The campground was pretty full and maybe it was the Boy Scout troop but Ratcliff was a better choice than Sam Rayburn this weekend because of the Big Bass Splash with it's 6000 entry draw. Here's a photo of me winning the Anti Big Bass Splash Tournament. 

You can see the rain that filled the canoe on Saturday night. 

Luca, Ezra, Parker, Warren and Morgan trash the water to a froth off the pier. Barely visible is Cullen whose main mode of transport for the time being is a wagon since he broke his leg and is awaiting casting. He did as well as anyone else casting from this seated position. 

The Zamora mobile. 

I think we ended up with about 10 fat bream with most boat fishermen scoring on lures or Catawba worms. I was hoping the panfish would be in full spawning mode but with the little cool front we did not locate any big concentrations with most fish holding tight to the weeds. Seemed to be some fish in the backwater right in the brush that were hard to target, especially with the crew I had.   

See that stick out over there, that's called a sickout. If you have not said this do you even know anything about boating? 

Later this week we are off with the camper again to Festival International in Lafayette. Warren and Coraline will again accompany us and we get to see one of our favorite Balkan Bands out of New York City, Slavic Soul Party. We have collected the cds for years so this is a big deal.  

 

Tackle Box Reorganization...

As a retired guy I mostly piddle around each day in a viscous unrelenting cycle of tuba playing, grand kids and fishing. I guess I am easily amused because when I finish the cycle, I start it over again and I have found that I usually find something new each cycle so maybe these are deep subjects with many meanings, shadings and analogies of life that hopefully I have enough time left to get to the bottom of. I took the time this past week to rearrange all the tackle boxes. 

I rarely buy a new lures so it's not like the collection of fishing lures are growing but I do restock the easily consumable and hangable things like hooks, weights, panfish jig heads and plastic lures. I had come to a system of stackable flat boxes that I kept in the boat compartments and switched out into a little tool bag satchel that I stocked with the appropriate gear then carried in the canoe, to the beach or wherever the trip took me. I used two old big tackle boxes to reduce the flat boxes by 4 or 5 so this is a more compact assortment than before. Many of the lures pictured here I bought as a teen or young adult, were my dad's or in the case of the big silver box gifted me from a life time collection by friends Suzi and Charley when they went through some recent downsizing.         

This is the box that gets the most use, the catfish or just general bait fishing gear. There's hooks, weights and slip corks. 

My dad's old tackle box. I cleaned this out by sorting the various lures into other specialized boxes and filled this with the content of the three flat boxes that held most of my saltwater tackle. There's one box left that is saltwater plastic tails so this reduces from about four boxes that I usually carried in a big boy scout backpack to two boxes. Sometimes I only saltwater fish once or twice a year but with the recent generator purchase for the RPod camper we hope to make use of the free camping on Texas beaches this summer.    

Top box here are Rapalas (some of my dad's favorite lures) and small crank baits. Bottom box is the saltwater jig tails. 

Yellow box is a Charlie Brewer Slider kit of bass sized lures. I like the slider worms and probably catch more bass on the panfish sizes than I do on these. On top of that is the rattle trap box. A rattle trap is a good bait, fresh or salt. It's an idiot bait. Any idiot throw it out and reel it in is gonna catch fish. 

Here's a couple of boxes of plastic worms the bottom one I found floating in the lake. The day I found it I posted on the Sam Rayburn Fishing report page my location if the owner was looking but no takers. Top box is old Hellbenders and deep diving crank baits. I don't know how many times as a kid I caught a big bass out the back of the boat on a Hellbender while the old man was trying to crappie fish.  

Cranks, top waters and spinner baits. Some probably a good 40 years old from the dawn of the golden age of mass produced lures.  

The old box Suzi and Charlie gave me. I combined these lures, sone from the collections of their parents with my dad's stuff from his box to make a general bass fishing box of cranks, old Devil's Horse top waters, chuggers and idiot baits. If some modern bass fisherman invites me I'll take this and maybe throw in a flat box of the plastic worms. . 

I labeled the boxes and so far if I have used a lure I return it to the right box. I guess all this will work time I cycle around and start piddling again. In my dad's old box there were at least 10 deep diving magnum Redfins that we used to catch the hybrids out of Rayburn on in the early 80s and I have a stash of them somewhere. It's a cycle that may never be finished.  

 

Village Creek State Park...

For a while now I have wanted to check out Village Creek State Park near Lumberton, Tx. I heard the canoeing, fishing and swimming on the creek sandbars was great. It was a cold day when we visited a couple of weekends ago so swimming was out and fishing poor but a very nice place to visit. 

Cathy poses on the creek at the canoe launch. Looks like a pontoon boat would be handier and there was one tied up at a home down stream from the park. I know that most canoe info on the internets gives various other launch points for interesting places to sightsee along this creek and I noted there was a ramp on highway 96 where a boy scout troop had launched that I would like to try.   

Spotted this Love Tree along the trail which seemed to have some ability to make romance bloom. Once on Lake Sam Rayburn along the banks of old Popher's Creek I spotted at tree with "1939" carved in it. 

 It might have been the bare trees of late winter but it seems the RV camping sites were close together without much space. Walk in primitive camping along the trails had some pretty nice looking places for those that travel light.  

We wanted to see the swimming area but the trail required the crossing of a slough which we were not eager to wade on a cold and windy day. Later we checked with a park ranger if we were on the right trail and we were. They said "sometimes the water is up, sometimes it's down." 

Cathy and brother Matt hike along the creek. There were nice sand banks in the background notable because I read sand mining is big right now. It's a valuable commodity apparently and there is some kind of digging project going on along the Farm Road into town near my house that I suspect is a sand mine.    

Good stands of cane along the creek. Nice hiding spots for Sasquatch. It is the Big Thicket. They have been spotted. 

There's a nice pavilion in the park along the creek. The yellow line marks the level of the water during Hurricane Harvey in 2017.  

It's a good park if you like canoeing or primitive camping and I suspect that with warming temps good pan fishing but I have been spoiled with good isolated RV sights the past year so what with the drive to Lumberton being a good couple of hours we probably won't have this park on regular rotation. 

Our purchase of a generator this week has us focused on the free beach front camping that Surfside has to offer so we are gearing up to try boondocking with the cord to State Parks and the RV hook ups cut.     

I do want to return to the area and check out the Ice House Museum in Silsbee. Looks interesting.