Monday-Monday...

Getting back into the daily grind is difficult at best after a couple days off fly fishing. The old adage of needing a vacation from my vacation rings quite true!

The fishing last week, the night fishing, was great. The HEX were on, but just starting. Wednesday and Thursday nights fishing was productive and we had a great time! Friday night...well, mother nature had different plans for us. Rain. Buckets and buckets of rain! The river rose almost 8 inches in the course of a few hours and that pretty much sealed the deal for the evening. In spite of that, it was a great day. Rain, storms, etc, are one of those things we have no control over so we might as well make the best of those situations. And we did. We sat on the camper steps, smoked a cigar, sipped some bourbon, had some pleasant conservation and marveled at the show mother nature provided. At times, it just don't get any better than that! It's all a matter of perspective.

Perspective was something I had to keep in mind yesterday afternoon (Monday) whereupon I found out my oldest had been in a wreck with the car. She rear-ended a Jeep liberty and the car got smacked up pretty good. The Jeep, nary a scratch! Cars can be repaired or replaced and as difficult it is to shrug off an inci-dent, you have to do it. Yes,yes, she's O.K. Just a bruised ego and a 90 dollar civil infraction. I, like most fathers, was trying to find the humor in the situation and thought about giving her the business as fathers are want to do. You know, maybe she was trying to read a bumper sticker or saw a cute boy.... However I mustered up what little will power I had and refrained from doing so...I think I'll just save it for a rainy day! For the life of me I still can't figure out why she called her Mom after the acci-dent and not her Dad....I mean, really, What's up with that? So, the Car:

It was funny though, when I did get home, it took her about 1/2 hour or so to finally come and see her Dad. I gave her a big hug, asked her if she was O.K. and left it at that. Mondays. Yeah.

15 years ago today my middle daughter was born. Now this was one that did not want to make an entrance into the world on her own so we forced her to via induced labor. That was in interesting time. We were told that once labor was induced it would take a while, 4 hours or so, for contractions to start. Yeah...right....more like 20 minutes. It was nothing gradual either. It was more like WHAM! Hard labor! 2 hours later a baby.

Talk about intense....for a period of time things were progressing at a dizzying speed and at one point I felt that way too. I plopped myself down into a chair, apparently looking pretty pale and,well, not sot hot. Everything in the room suddenly stopped and all eyes, doctors, nurses, the wife, were on me. "You O.K?" came the question? "Yeah...I'mjus fine....just get that kid out...I'll be fine" I replied....apparently I nearly passed out...but didn't...pretty tough arn't I?? It was quite the event...and here we are, 15 years later and sometimes I still wanna pass out! In retrospect that was a cakewalk compared to the "teen-age daughter" years we are now, currently, forced to endure... lemme tell ya.

My daughters tell me I'm clueless and that I don't understand girls....come to think of it my wife says that too...I plead ignorance and I, u-mmm, think I'm O.K. with that most of the time!

Off to Whip Some Trout

I'm off to go, as TKW so lovingly put it, "Trout Whipping" or as Zonker put it "Trout Snuggling" tomorrow and Friday. Yes, I am playing hook-y from work and family life, shirking my responsibilities, to go fly fishing for trout. To heck with Gas prices I say (right now) politics and everything else...man that sounds kinda callous don't it??

This time of year trout fishing is done at night, in the dark. Weird as that may sound, it is some of the most exciting fishing there is and gets ones adrenaline going. Trout eat insects. And the insect that is the new york strip of insects in the Hexagenia Limbata or giant Michigan May-fly. Trout Love 'em as much as kids love chicken nuggets And not just any trout. BIG trout! Big Bugs catch Big Trout!

Hexagenia Limbata (Or just "HEX")

It starts like a rise of small trout. There small rings on the surface, little fingerling trout eating midges, perhaps. But these are no fish.

Then, the water breaks, and up pop the yellow sails of a giant Hexagenia, then another and another. Then there is a flash below the mayfly and it vanishes in a slurp so loud it echoes off the distant bank. A square tail, like a shark fin, breaks the surface behind the swirl as a brown trout twice the size of your net turns back toward his deeper lair. The Hex hatch is on.

This event plays out every year on calm, dark, humid nights in early July. Anglers who only fly fish once a year drive hundreds of miles to play their part in the drama, while the mayflies themselves make the television news by showing up on doppler radar or calling snowplows out of dormancy to remove layers of Hexagenia duns from the bridges. In the cold trout rivers of Wisconsin and Michigan, huge nocturnal brown trout whose usual menu consists of smaller browns become, for a week or so, prime dry fly quarry.

Fishing at night, In the dark is full of challenges Usually you cannot see what your casting to...your casting to sound...you can't watch your back-cast either...or see where your walking in the stream. If your unfortunate, you can turn somewhat claustrophobic surrounded by the darkness...you think you hear things in the woods, just off the bank, behind you, that arn't there yet your mind races with all sorts of horrors from Cougars to Black Bears to Jason of Friday the 13th movie fame lurking in the darkness. It's just wierd-exciting fshing!

The best thing about night-time fishing is that there are no bad casts!

I can't wait to get in the water and wet a line!