Visiting South Carolina...

We made a visit to South Carolina to see Morgan Ali and kids. It was a good to see them and we got in a variety of activities. First there was the driving route there using our hybrid Toyoda which eats up the highway miles compared to the plodding camper tow we have been used to on many trips, there was a couple of different routes used so max sightseeing, we fished, we hiked, we grilled and ate home cooking, we watch the kid's soccer practice and sampled local restaurants.  

The grandkids are getting so big and so responsible. Nobody fell in the lake making this photo, not even Pop-Pop. 

This is an old CCC bridge built of local materials. Paris Mountain State Park is part of the Appalachian deciduous rain forest.

Me and Morgan fished Lake Hartwell which is just minutes from their house. I caught two very good sized Kentucky spotted bass and Morgan lost a couple that shook off at the boat so I count this as an almost fish dinner.  

Always a good feeling to fish with your son (or daughters) and score on an unfamiliar lake. 

One thing I see watching kids spots is that most of the time they are figuring out what to do. Sometimes watching pro sports I see guys doing the same thing. One of my specialties I have come to realize is taking a photo then cropping it up to make kid sports action look fierce. 

It was a very smooth trip and with gas prices slightly over $4 in some places along the way I was proud to be driving a Hybrid and hitting 47.9 miles per gallon. I think in the past I have achieved 51mpg but maybe I drove faster or need sparkplugs or something but the 31.2 gallon of gas used for 1831.3 miles to cross half the country and back is maybe just a little more than what the truck pulling camper uses for a beach trip. 

Traveling is great. 

  

 

A Quick Travel Blog and Then Off Again...

We have been traveling and I am writing a quick blog to answer all your questions like where did you go and who is that woman in the closed beach area and so on. 

We have traveled to Kentucky for my cousin Carolyn and husband Doug's 65 wedding anniversary. It was a great party with great testimonies from their kids (cousins I'd never met) to their love, good food, music and fun. 

Along the way we camped in addition to our stay in Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas. The total trip was a little over 1500 miles.  

All the parks we stayed were familiar places to us being we camped there before and in Kentucky at Lake Malone State Park we always see sister Margret and Kevin at their lake house which is right across from the state park swimming area. You can see the house and dock in the trees behind Cathy. I guess since we area back in Texas maybe Kentucky laws concerning the use of closed swimming areas no longer apply. 

We are not home long and depart for the beach shortly where the swimming areas are always open. 

This is a month for travel because with Mary off from work with the baby we have have some free time. More blogs soon. 

This Made Me Sad...

I was driving down the main drag of town today and I spotted this old boat, motor and trailer loaded up and headed somewhere. I made me kind of sad because I'll bet it never sees the water again. 

That looks to me like some kind of late 70s rig. Not a huge boat compared to some bass fishing rigs you see these days but it comes from a time when they were starting to make the hulls a little more streamlined because people wanted to cover more water and the 80 plus sized outboard let them do it faster and safer. The after market trim fin on the foot indicates this was probably a heavy piece of fiberglass that someone tried to squeeze just a little more performance out of. I put one of those on a motor myself once upon a time. 

This rig makes me think of the good old days of bass fishing with my dad. Topwaters, spinner baits and redfins tossed up against logpiles. Since you didn't have a depthfinder all water seemed deep till the motor drug the bottom. A limit of bass was 15 till they cut it down to 10 and then they only had to be 10" long for to be a keeper and you hung them over the side of the boat on a chain stringer. We broke a few of those chain stringers, separating the links due to the weight of the fish we hung on there till we got smart and started chunking them in an ice chest. 

It was the good old days. The largemouth bass was not yet a holy fish receiving livewell supplements to keep him peppy for the tournament weigh in and a better preventive  maintenance healthcare plan than 99.8% of the planet and you better be sure he's alive when you throw him back. There were not $500 classes to teach me how to use my new depth finder. I can remember when I thought $10 was way too much to spend on a fishing rod. Boats were bought with cash instead of a ten year loan. 

Now before I sound like a get off my lawn baby boomer I know things are different and sometimes the things I know are not even valid anymore. Even though that old boat was suspiciously headed out a highway where one of those cash for scrap metal places is located people do restore these things. You don't see it much around here but I see vintage boats when I travel. That one might just need a good pressure washing, some fiberglass work and new hardware. Being that thousands upon thousands of outboard motors have been built for generations there are plenty of parts and occasionally I see old ones found new in the box in a warehouse or barn so finding the correct period motor in good running condition is not out of the question. It will certainly be easier to work on that my modern model which requires a trained mechanic. 

Hopefully this will be the outcome because it just makes me sad to think a boat won't see the water again. That means there will be people who won't be out on the lake, kids that won't fish or ski and somebodies old Pop-Pop will just be left remembering how things were.  

       

 

Summer Fishing Report...

Cathy and I made it to the lake yesterday for a fishing trip. We've had some lake trips this summer and as per our summer water activity the past few years we have not been too mad at the catfish but instead spent our time tubing and swimming in relief of the hot weather. We swan yesterday but decided we did not want to get out of practice cooking fried fish. 

Though we headed out in the late afternoon fishing was slow for fillet sized fish was slow and we caught a bucket of these miniature blue cats. The Sam Rayburn Lake record for blue cat is 83 pounds. The biggest one we have personally caught was 32 pounds. These have some growing to do. I think I have found small catfish up to about 8" in the bellies of larger catfish. 

Seems our old favorite place that's usually a go to spot from August through January has dried up the past could of years. I think maybe other fishermen have discovered it because last trip one of the grandkids snagged some kind of bait bucket fish attractor and pulled it up. We let it back down but generally extra fishing pressure means small fish are the only ones left. 

We checked around the area to discover a new spot and nearby we clocked 52' depths which means with the lake being 8' low it's normally 60' deep in this spot and and fished the edges which were 25'deep finally producing enough fillet size fish for a fish dinner for two.  When the water comes up the tie ups to old stumps we used will be under water. 

Here's the what the world needs now is another picture of Cathy with a catfish picture. 

With a swim, a nice breeze and an Astros game on the bluetooth speaker it was a nice afternoon on the lake. Supper was even better with Fried catfish and farmers market okra and collard greens. 

 

Miles and Miles of Shoreline...

I like fishing. Sometimes people pass on tips to me like, "They are really biting down at the old community hole..." and I have headed down there to get in on the fun. Usually though at a place like that I don't catch anything. I get there and it's crowded with everyone else that heard they were biting at the community hole, there's trash left by Johnny come lately opportunist, my fishing tactics are tuned into a different kind of thing and all in all it's not exactly my idea of a great time in the outdoors. Fortunately, living near the biggest lake totally within the state of Texas there is plenty of room to get out there and at some of my favorite spots I may never even see another person. 

Even though it was the beginning of a holiday weekend we had been tubing with no one else in the area and had pulled to the shore for a picnic when this group of boaters and jet skiers, there was at least 4 miles of empty shoreline between here and the nearest launch, put in right next to us. That's my boat and you can see how close their set up was. 

To their credit they did not bother us. The kids were kept in check as pap paw warned, "I'll whip so hard you won't be able to go to school next year," and someone else advised, "Don't cuss, there's people over there." Now I don't doubt pap paw was probably kidding about the whipping and I warned Cathy not to cuss either but you get the idea. We are bombarded by input from various sources everyday and the lake should be a getaway. 

We finished our picnic and resumed tubing. The also tubed and jet skied in the area but thankfully kept to respectable distances. 

Only boater that came close was the Angelina County Sheriff's Department Patrol Boat. We were fully in compliance with the law and our pro tip is you don't have to tell them where you caught the fish. Just say at the community hole. 

 

   Miguel and the boys tube

There's one person who won't be on the tube this summer and it's our resident knee board and stunt specialist, Mary. Won't be long now.

There are a couple of people in training. Here's Ezra trying for daylight.  

Luca tries for outside the wake but it helps if you have some weight. 

Here's the boat ramp, Friday afternoon the third of July. It's not crowded. 

There's miles and miles of lake out there for you to fish, tube and have fun.  

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.   

     

 

   

 

Rainy Day Finding Fun...

 Everyone has been craving a lake day since the great success and exhilaration of last week's tube trip (I want fried catfish!) but those pesky afternoon thunderstorms while bring much needed rain are cramping our style. This made us look around for land based fun so we visited Caddo Mounds and Mission Tejas State Park. 

This was the first time we had re visited the mounds, still sacred to the Caddo People and dating back 1,500 years since the reconstruction of the new visitors center and grass hut since a big storm wrecked the area a few years ago. I mentioned to the park ranger our visit to Poverty Point Mounds in Louisiana and he said I might have been your tour guide as I retired from there. The Poverty Point Mounds are much older and he told us that the Caddo mounds were sort of accidental as they kept building and having burials in the same spots and it elevated the terrain and the Poverty Point mounds, whose purpose is lost to prehistory were made by hunter gatherers for an unknown purpose.  

The Grass hut gives you and idea of how they lived. 

Good value for seniors and kids as we spent about $8 on admission but blew that savings in the gift shop as we bought a couple of books and kid fun items. 

Next stop, Mission Tejas just down the road had a ranger program called back yard bass. We occasionally visit here for hiking, to soak up the history of the Spanish Missions in Texas and I enjoy cane poling the small creek bass in the San Pedro. The ranger program the kids took part in was well done and you would have thought they were really catching fish. 

It was pretty close as to who the best casters were, the rangers or the kids. 

There is a pond in the park but it's pretty choked with weeds and if there was a swim area to cool off I'd probably come here for camping since the sites are recently redone but it's still a nice quiet place with a deep history. 

Ok, now the hard decisions, Mexican or Cajun tonight? 

It occurred to me as added the links about our previous trips to these spots is that I kind of keep doing the same old things over and over again. Maybe it's a quest to enjoy the spirituality of these places and the knowledge of long lost times. Might be something we need to know. 

   

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Summer Tube Season Lake Report...

I'll admit that I messed up. That's getting easier to do because at this stage of my life it daily occurs to me  that there are many times I messed up. The latest mess up occurred to kick off summer 2026 tubing season at the lake. I had a brand new tube, never used that had been purchased in the winter months at a charity auction to benefit a good cause. It was still stored in it's packing had the crew waiting  patiently to put it to good use. 

They all loaded on it including Milo, who just turned three. Following the big brothers is his main occupation. I started out slow to see how the towable performed but as you can see from the photo all were too close to the front and the tube immediately nose dived and dumped them. That was enough for Milo. He made no more attempts at water sports for the day and like many of my other failures in judgment and experience this will be a scarring memory.    

Apparently no one else noticed or got hurt physically or psychotically so they were good to go.  

I started both Ezra and Luca on the knee board from shallow water, almost on the bank and it was such a good start it had me contemplating if I could start like that instead of the belly start and crawl to kneeling which was a move Ezra soon mastered.    

I think both boys got their mother's knee boarding gene and will soon be showing some tricks. 

Water was 82 degrees which in the warm sun seemed better that the water aerobics pool has been lately.  

I might think about fishing sometime but right now being a tube boat driver seems like gainful employment.  

Outside the wake. 

After admitting all these failures and mess-ups all I really wanted to do was spend the summer at the lake with a girl.  

A tube boat driver requires an occupational stump watcher to sit up front. 

 

Pre-Big Bass Splash Fishing Report...

 This weekend is a Big Bass Splash Fishing Tournament on Sam Rayburn and the lake was strangely quiet the day before an expected 3000 entries try to hit the water and win. There was plenty of parking at the ramp and I could only see one camper in the park but many campsites are still in disrepair from Hurricane Beryl and after all the popular big bass spots on the lake are on down a way and it was a perfect day for our late afternoon catfish trip. 

You can see from this photo how close to the shore we were. Right in front of the boat juts a little sandbar which when we untied to leave we let the stiff south wind blow us up on and caused me to take a swim in belly deep water to float us off. The water is 82 degrees which is probably a little warmer than our water aerobics class has been lately so swimming season is on us. 

Cathy caught this fat channel cat on the first cast dropping her slip cork rig in a 4.5 foot deep creek which dead ends in the first photo but at normal lake levels is passable into the the Deer Stand area cove. Final total was 8 channel cats, nice fillet size. There was a lot of shad activity in this cove and we had many throw backs as it was just full of 8 to12 inch cats in a feeding frenzy. 

The lake is so low looks like I'm bank fishing in this photo.

I think this is a man made structure of branches piled around a stump to create a fishing holding spot along an edge leading up to a point which when the lake comes up should hold some fish. 

Of course we ate fried catfish, blackened potatoes on the blackstone and salad. 

I pronounce that summer has arrived. Be careful with those tournament fishermen on the lake this weekend but truth be told we caught these fish after the time of what will be their final weigh in so if you leave late should be good.