Category Archives: Fishing Ramblings – My Fishing Blog

Random thoughts and musings about fishing

Pond Scum Not Grass In Yard

    I have pond scum growing in my yard where there should be grass. It looks nasty but at least I don’t have to cut it.  Part of my back and side yard has been underwater for months, killing the grass and allowing the scum to form on top.   

The water finally stopped flowing over my driveway coming from my back yard running out to the ditch at the road.  It stopped just in time for it to rain again. 

As with the virus crisis, this too will pass, and I would not be surprised if my yard dries out so much this summer the grass dies from lack of rain.   

That has happened three times since 1981 when  I moved into this house.  A very wet winter and spring followed by very dry summers.  Its not that unusual, regardless of the claims of the true believers in that “climate changie thingie.”

Social Distancing Like a Sportsman

Seven Ways to Do Social Distancing Like a Sportsman
By Whit Fosburg, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership
from The Fishing Wire

Families all over the world are experiencing serious life impacts due to COVID-19. Aside from health impacts, businesses are closing, travel is banned, schools are being moved to virtual classrooms, and many people are afraid.

So what can you do to make the most of this difficult time? First, you must follow all health advice and wash your hands, abide by social distancing rules, and take this seriously to protect you and your loved ones.

But here are seven other suggestions for making the most of this unexpected off-season from, well, everything.

Pick Up Your Laptop or LetterheadNow is the time to write your member of Congress on the key policy issues that will make a difference when you get back outside. Whether it’s passing the Great American Outdoors Act, digitizing public access routes, or preserving migration corridors, we’re here to help you get your message in the right hands.

Check out our one-stop advocacy shop here.

Get Out and ScoutMalls, bars, and restaurants may be closed. Concerts canceled and museums shuttered. But fear not: Now is the perfect chance to get outside and scout. Look for deer sign from last year and plot your next hunt. Listen for gobblers. Look for late season sheds. Explore that tributary you’ve always been curious about but have never fished. You’re away from the crowds, getting good exercise, and advancing your skills in the woods. (If you do encounter others, say, on our public lands, maintain six feet of distance, per CDC recommendations.)

Practice, Practice, Practice

Can’t get to the range? This is a great time to set up a target in the backyard and practice your archery skills (or, if you live in very rural areas, your rifle skills). Break out the fly rod and a hula hoop and practice your casting. You may be surprised how much you can improve.

Feed a FamilyThis is a good time to sort through your freezer and donate your harvest or catch to the local food bank. There are many families in need right now, so if you have extra, be generous and make sure we’re all doing our part to help our neighbors.

Try a New Wild Game RecipeThat bag of venison labeled “sausage”? Those snow goose breasts? Take a risk, and try a new dish. We recommend checking out MeatEater’s recipe log for something like venison fennel lasagna or rabbit schnitzel.

Reload, Repair, and Tie

For those of you who load your own ammunition, this is a great time to get ahead. Refinishing a stock that’s taken a beating over the years? Do it now. And with trout season around the corner, it’s time to replenish your fly box. Even if you’ve never tied a fly and always been curious, why not start now? YouTube is waiting.

Read Hunting and fishing have always inspired great writing. From Theodore Roosevelt’s many volumes on hunting to Norman Maclean’s classic prose on fishing and life in A River Runs through It, catch up on classics. Or try something new, like Mark Kenyon’s exploration of our public lands in That Wild Country

For more on TRCP’s conservation efforts, visit www.trcp.org.

Are You Prepared For A Crisis?

To each his or her own. While some panic and buy toilet paper, others with more rationality stock up on ammo and buy guns.  Those waiting until now to do so are kinda late. Many of us have many guns and thousands or rounds of ammo stored away.   

The Brady bunch, in their daily money begging emails, are all in a dither about so many people buying guns and ammo.  They hate that rational people know in times of panic and breakdown of society, the only thing that will protect you is a gun, just like in normal times.   

For those asking what we are afraid of, the answer is “nothing.”  Just like keeping a fire extinguisher or first aid kit handy, we are not scared of fire or minor injuries, we are just prepared for any possibility.   

This crisis will pass with things returning to normal for most of us. For some old at-risk folks like me, we may not survive, but for the great majority life will return to what passes for normal.   

But under worse case scenarios, city folks will not be prepared to survive without food and other necessities delivered regularly.  There are even memes, somewhat tongue in cheek, with those dependent on daily supplies saying they will go to the country and take what they want from those of us that are prepared and have food.   

One meme I like shows the response to that.  It says, “You do realize you are talking about stealing from those that have to decide each day which gun to take with them in their truck?”     

There are great stories of people and businesses helping others out in crisis.  But there are always those that are jealous of what others have and want to take it.    You do not have to be paranoid to be prepared, not just when a crisis hits but every day.

Covid-19 Hurts Us All

The Spring that Wasn’t – Covid-19 Hurts Us All

By Frank Sargeant, Editor
from The Fishing Wire

I just spent a couple hours listening to a collection of my Florida fishing guide buddies complain that all their spring charters are cancelling just at the time when the spring bite has gone off both inshore and offshore. It’s a time when many of them make a major portion of the income that carries them through the rest of the year.

Each year, beginning around St. Patrick’s Day and continuing through May, the coastal fish in Florida go bonkers as all the bait begins to move in and the fish gorge themselves, packing on weight prior to late spring and summer spawning times.

Inshore, it’s snook, reds and trout, while off the beach it’s king mackerel, Spanish mackerel and cobia. Tarpon will be along soon, typically when water temperature hits about 75. Fish are practically jumping into the boats. Some guides run two trips a day during this period.

This year, they’re sitting at the docks. And they’re pissed. Many blame over-reaction by the government and the media. Even driving down to the Florida Keys as a non-resident is impossible. Hotels and marinas are shut down. Most of the big fishing piers are closed statewide.

Most of my pals are not math majors. Me either—that’s why I started adult life as a fishing guide instead of an astro-physicist. But it seems to me the part a lot of us are still not getting is that we are, unfortunately, very early in the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

While the overall percentage of those who have tested positive in the U.S. is relatively low as this is written, about 20,000 on a population of 320 million, it’s the rate that the infection number is going up that is concerning the smart, dedicated people charged with controlling this outbreak.

In fact, I’m writing this Saturday—it’s safe to say that by Monday, the number is going to be closer to 30,000 than it is to 20,000. It’s doubling about every 6 days per the CDC. Multiply that out a few weeks (yes, I’ll have to use a calculator) and even us guide-types can begin to see a very serious potential problem. A problem, in fact, the likes of which we have not had to face in the modern era.

What’s happening in Italy, a fully modernized Western democracy where hospitals—and morgues—are completely overwhelmed, is a more likely projection of where we’re headed than what happened in China, where the Communist regime clamped down with vice-like restrictions that would stop cold the hearts of every member of the ACLU, but also stopped the virus spread among the populace, at least for the time being.

I was among those who early-on believed “it can’t happen here”, but clearly it can and it is. We can hope that the malaria drug with antibiotic turns out to be a miracle cure or at least a palliative, and that a vaccination arrives super fast—but super-fast in that world is at least 12 months. Until then, the only remedy is for us to pretty much stay away from each other, and to wash hands and/or disinfect pretty much anything that comes to our door.

To be sure, the people that are most hurt by a complete shutdown will be small businesses and single-operators like fishing guides. They aren’t going to get unemployment checks, but their boat payments will continue. So will their rent or mortgage payments, and the cost of groceries and shoes for their kids. While some go to other work when guiding slows, there won’t be as many of those jobs available this year as the economy grinds to a halt. (Amazon and Walmart are hiring fast to handle online ordering, but other jobs are disappearing faster than the last ice in Minnesota.)

One plus out of this, when we come out the other side, is that the fish—which don’t catch COVID-19—are getting a long vacation from fishing pressure. Fishing should be great when we can get back to it. And for the meantime, if you have a secret angling spot you like to sneak off to on your own, there’s very little risk—and the fresh air and the chance to get away from CNN and FOX will probably do you good.

We’ll come through this, and it won’t take long for the American economy to gear up and get back to business as usual. In the meantime, we’re all going to have to hunker down and play with what we’ve been dealt, in the Spring that wasn’t.

Eating Out At Restaurants While Fishing

One of the perks of traveling around Georgia and Alabama doing research for my Map of the Month articles is exploring places to eat.  Many of the places I eat are memorable, most for the good food, some not so much. And a couple literally gave me a stomachache.  

  I love to cook and most food I cook at home is better than what I can get in restaurants.  I never look for a steak, pork chops, Italian, or any kind of country cooking since that is what I cook at home.  And my fried bass filets are good enough I won’t eat fried fish in a restaurant. But I don’t do fried seafood very well and I love fried scallops, so I seek them out. 

My second choice, usually easier to find, is fried shrimp.    I am seldom in a big city, so I eat in small towns and around the lake.  And after driving several hours to get there, I don’t want to go too far for food the first day. After spending the next day on the water getting information, I really do not want to drive far that night.

Often, small hole-in the-wall type places turn out surprisingly good. And some of them have interesting histories and backgrounds.  A few years ago, when at Logan Martin Lake near Pell City Alabama, I found “The Ark,” a little nothing looking place with a very rustic interior just off the Riverside exit on I-20.

When I walked in I was greeted by my kind of people, with accents like mine. The wood paneling was dark from years of food frying in the kitchen, and the walls were decorated with racing memorabilia. Riverside is not many miles for Talladega and many famous stock car drivers have eaten at The Ark, most loving the catfish if their autographs are any indication.

The back of the menu tells the story of “The Ark.”  Back in the early 1900s most of the counties in that area were “dry” meaning you could not buy alcohol legally. This was long before the lakes were built and the Coosa River itself was the county line of the two counties there, but they considered the edge of the rive the county line.  So, the river itself was not under the jurisdiction of either counties’ law enforcement.

E. O “Red” Thompson, being an enterprising young man, bought an old barge and anchored it in the river about 30 feet from the bank.  He made a four-foot wide walkway to it and provided tie-ups for locals with boats to access the bar onboard.

A salvaged sign from that old bar said “Beer 15 cents” and “All the catfish and hushpuppies you can eat, 60 cents.”  Apparently, many folks had “fun” there, eating catfish and drinking their favorite beverages that were illegal on the nearby bank, all during prohibition and the roaring 20s. The original Ark burned and by then laws were more liberal, so Red build a restaurant on the bank near the road.  It too burned a long time ago, but the current restaurant was built across the highway.  No dates were given, but I would guess sometime in the 1950s.

Catfish is the staple on the menu, but you can get everything from chicken livers to frog legs. The jumbo shrimp I got that first night were exceptional, very lightly battered and fried to perfection.  The cup of gumbo started the meal just right and I loved the hushpuppies served with it.

Every time I am at Logan Martin for an article, I stay at a motel about five minutes from The Ark and have eaten there several times. Last summer the Potato Creek Bass Masters fished our July tournament there and I camped about 15 minutes away for a week, driving up two nights to splurge at The Ark.

Monday I drove over to Childersburg on Lay Lake, the next lake downstream on the Coosa River.  I checked and my GPS said I was 30 miles and 45 minutes from The Ark. After the miserable three hours drive in the rain, I just could not make myself do that, so I went to “La Parrilla,” a Mexican restaurant across the street from my motel.

It was a nice surprise, with bright fresh paint, excellent service and even better food.  I thought it must be new but one of my waiters said they had been there 14 years. I had my favorite, chili rellenos, and they were as good as I have eaten.After a rainy day of fishing Tuesday, I just had to drive up to The Ark Tuesday night for dinner. As expected, it was well worth the drive and the cup of gumbo and dozen big butterflied shrimp stuffed me just right.

Do You Have Hunting Rituals?

Hunting Rituals

If you have hunted much you probably have rituals you go through. Some, like sighting in your rifle, are critical for success. Others, like carrying a buckeye in your pocket, are more mental that critical. But even those mental ones can be important since confidence breeds success.

Being member of a deer club that has a camp each year will introduce you to many more rituals.  For years at Big Horn Hunting Club a big iron pot hung over the fire.  Not only was a fire burning constantly from camp opening until the time we all left, water was added constantly all week to keep it full for washing dishes or other hot-water needs.

Then we got a gas fired water heater that produced all we needed.  Guess what?  The kettle stayed over the fire and we still kept if full of water.

Don’t dare shoot at a deer and miss during camp. You have to admit missing when you come back to camp since others have surely heard you shoot.  And the ritual at many camps and even in non-camp groups is to cut out your shirt tail if you miss.  I’m pretty sure some guys carried an old shirt they didn’t like in their truck just so they could change if they missed a deer.

Blooding is another common ritual.  When a youth kills their first deer some blood from it is smeared on their face, usually just a finger mark down one cheek.  And the youth will not wash it off for days, it is a mark to wear proudly!

In many clubs it is a ritual to eat the liver of a deer the day you kill one.  There are some good reasons for this. It tastes good – if you like liver.  It is easy to process in the woods. All you have to do is set it aside when gutting your deer then slice it up. 

Showing respect for your kill is another ritual some of us stick with.  Most of them come down from Native Americans who depended on killing game for their survival.  From the time I shot my first bird with a BB gun I have always felt a tiny spark of regret for killing something.  So when I read about ways to show respect to the animal for giving up its spirit for your needs I liked them.

Of course the most important way to show respect is to make a good shot, killing the animal with as little suffering as possible. 

As soon as I confirm the deer is dead, as the Native Americans would do, I pause for a minute looking at the beauty of the deer and thank it for its sacrifice, remembering what it took to outsmart it in its natural habitat, or just the luck I had that day.

That makes me even more determined to use every bit of the deer I can and waste nothing. That is another way of honoring a deer or any other animal you kill.

In Europe a similar practice developed. A successful hunter would place a sprig of an evergreen into the deer’s mouth then put a spring of the plant into their cap, connecting the two.  The sprig in the deer’s mouth also honored its last meal. 

Some of my rituals bring back good memories. On my first dove shoot when I was about ten years old one of my uncles gave me an old army surplus gas mask bag for my hunting stuff.  I killed my first dove that day and to this day I carry some necessities for the hunt in my bag. It has my skinning knife, bullets, a couple of plastic garbage bags, some rope and a spool of cord and toilet paper.

I mentioned a buckeye for success earlier. When I was a kid many of us had one we carried for luck. We would cherish it and polish it often, making I shiny and bright.  It was as necessary as our pocket knives and we went nowhere without both.

Zeroing in your gun is critical, especially if you have a scope, which most of us do.  Old iron sights didn’t change much but a scope can change a lot from year to year, causing you to miss your shot.  A few shots fired at the range before season opens, and again if you drop your gun or hunt in widely changing temperatures, makes sure if you get your shirt tail cut off it is your fault, not your gun’s fault.

The Griffin Gun Club opens its range each year, usually the first Saturday in October, and members are there to help you make sure your gun hits where you aim it. They are experts at sighting in a rifle and can fine tune with just a few shots.

Get ready for hunting by going through all your pre-season rituals and zero in your gun. Then, as you hunt and experience your rituals, remember where they came from and why they are important.

Who Created Your Fishing Legacy?

Fishing Legacy

All of us that love the outdoors and hunting and fishing have someone or many people in our past that molded that passion.  It is often a parent or grandparent but sometimes its someone in our family that took us hunting and fishing growing up and instilled their love of it in us. But other times they are friends or people we met outside family.

My mother and her mother loved fishing. Both of them could sit by a pond on their lard bucket and watch a cork for hours. Some of my earliest memories are following one or both of them to a local pond with our cane poles, hoping to catch anything that would bite.

The first bass I ever caught was while fishing with mom at a local pond. We were down below the dam, fishing the pool of water at the spillway. When my cork went under and I raised my pole I expected the circling pull of a bream or the tugging toward the bottom of a catfish. Instead, a 10 inch bass jumped out of the water several times. I was instantly hooked on bass fishing.

Two of my uncles took me fishing some when I was a kid, and both of them loved bass fishing.  I spent hours with them in jon boats on local ponds, throwing “rubber” worms and topwater plugs.  They taught me where to cast and how to scull a boat, slowly easing around the bank with a paddle before I ever saw an electric trolling motor.

I moved to Griffin in 1972 and met Jim Berry. When I bought my first bass boat in 1974 he invited me to join the Spalding County Sportsman Club and my first tournament ever was with that club in April, 1974 – 42 years ago. I have not missed many tournaments since that one.

The Sportsman Club was formed in the 1950s and they did a little of everything, from having some hunting land and a dove field in Pike County to going fishing on a big lake and camping for the weekend.  And it was something of a family affair.  In our tournaments there were many father/son fishing pairs as well as long term friends and business partners.

In my first tournament we camped at Mistletoe State Park as a group.  Back then the tournament director carried two big boards and the results were written on them each day.  The next year, when I became secretary/treasurer of the club, a job I have held almost every year since then, the boards were given to me.  We had quit using them after the Clarks Hill tournament and the results of it were still on it.

I still have those boards stored in my barn. You can barely make out the writing on it.  But you can still see names like Emmett Piland, Vance Sharp, Kenneth Hattaway, Paul Varnadoe and others. They were all in “A” division. In those days we competed in two divisions based on how many tournament points we had. I was in “B” division in my first tournament.

The four people above all taught me a lot about bass fishing over the next few years. I went with Emmett a lot and he showed me places on big lakes to fish and how to catch bass on a crankbait.  Paul Varnadoe fished the professional trails and shared a lot of tips with me.

Vance Sharp owned the local jewelry store now run by his son, Tony, and Vance was an expert with a depthfinder.  Tony had built it for him from a kit before most fishermen had ever heard of depthfinders and Vance used it for many years. He could ride over a point or drop-off staring at that depthfinder and suddenly throw out a marker, and say cast right there. And we caught fish almost every time!

I remember fishing with Kenneth at Eufaula and he taught me how to make an underhand circle cast to quickly cover water with a spinnerbait. But his advice at a Top Six tournament was invaluable and I still go by it.

In that 1983 tournament on the first day I caught a lot of bass on the riprap on a 1/16 ounce slider head with a four inch worm on it.  The first day I caught more than 20 small keepers the first three hours, then ran up the river and landed a five pound kicker on a Shadrap, a plug that had just come on the market. I was in sixth place out of 540 fishermen after day one!

That night at the motel I was saying maybe I should run up the river the first thing the next day to catch bigger fish. Kenneth looked at me and said “How many bass did you catch on the riprap and how many bites did you get up the river?”

When I told him only one bite up the river in four hours he said “Boy, you stay on that riprap until you have a limit tomorrow!”

The next morning I caught three on the riprap quickly but then they quit biting. I was torn, wanting to go up the river but remembering Kenneth’s advice, I stayed on the riprap.  At noon I caught five keepers on five consecutive casts.

Those fish moved me to fourth place in the tournament. All the people that I talked with that had fished the river never got a bite.  Kenneth taught me to stay on a pattern that I working and I still fish that way.

Remember and honor the people in your past that taught you about the outdoors.  They have made us what we are.

Growing Up Southern


I am proud of Growing Up Southern

    Growing up in the south makes us different from others that did not have that privilege, and we are proud of it. Our experiences may be shared by people in other parts of the US, but we have our own special way of looking at and doing everything.

     Many kinds of fish live all over the US but in the south bass are king and we fish for crappie to eat.  In the north musky are king and they fish for walleye for food. 

    Musky fight hard and they are harder to catch than bass, but they get huge, with 40 pounders not too unusual. Bass fight hard and a ten pounder is not common, but it doesn’t take the famed 10,000 casts it takes to hook a musky to hook a bass, most days.

    Walleye taste good but I will put crappie up against them any day. On a trip to Tennessee a few years ago I took some crappie filets for the communal fish fry and a couple of guys from Michigan brought walleye filets. Everyone there said the crappie were better.

    `Deer hunting is not the same here as it is up north and in the mid West and West.  Here we hide in trees and wait on a deer while swatting mosquitoes.  Up north they freeze their feet off tracking deer through the snow. And out west where Mule Deer grow, they jump one, wait for it to run a hundred yards before turning to look back, then shoot it.

    `In cold climates they go ice skating in the winter. We go roller skating.  And they cut holes in the ice on ponds and lakes, sit there staring at a tiny pole and hope for a bite.

    Our water doesn’t get hard on top so we can fish out of our boats all winter and big bass bite best then.  Almost all my eight pound plus bass hit from December through February.  They would be too big to come through a hole in the ice.

    In other rural areas kids probably dam branches, build tree houses and camp out. But there seems to be more rural areas here where kids grew up in the woods.  Can you imagine trying to dam a sewer, build a light pole house or camping in an alley?

    We eat different wild critters here, too.  Forget grits, a staple of southern diets that will just get a puzzled look when you order them in Wisconsin, as I found out.  Many other common southern foods are not eaten in other areas.

    Crawfish are popular here and you can catch your own. Some places up north serve crawfish but not many. And alligator meat is great, and you can catch and kill your own here, too.  But up north it is a rarity and many are afraid of it.

    Squirrels, rabbits and doves are eaten often in the south and sometimes up north, but nobody in other areas of the country eat possums, and the sweet potatoes that you have to serve with them are store bought, not grown and hilled in  your garden like here.

    Greens up north and out west mean lettuce, spinach and chard.  Those are all good but you can’t be southern without loving turnip greens with roots, collards and poke salad. And you must have corn bread to eat with them and cook them with streak of lean.

    Here we sweat, in other areas without our heat and humidity they perspire. In the summer you start dripping almost as soon as you step outside.  Our summer lows are usually much higher then the high temperature in other places.

    I was surprised to find out mosquitoes can be just as bad up north as they are here, but at least they don’t have chiggers.  I get a laugh every time I see a tourist with northern license plates on their car getting Spanish moss to take home. They are taking more than the moss, and are in for an itchy surprise in a day or so.

    We are different in the south, and there is even a difference in the name for Yankees that come south for a visit and those that move here and try to make us just like them. But that is impossible!

    Although I have visited 40 of our 50 states and fished in many of them, and been to many foreign countries on five different continents, I have lived in middle Georgia all my life. There is no better place on earth!

Cleaning Reels and Guns

 know it makes me a bad person, but as much as I love to fish and hunt, I hate cleaning reels and guns.  And now, my shaky hands make it very hard to do and gives me a good excuse. 

Fortunately, I have good options. I take my reels to Big Ernie’s Tackle in Bonanza and in a few days get my reels back cleaned and any repairs made.

For years, before getting a magnetic holder that keeps my pistol handy under the dash or my truck, I kept my semiautomatic Glock in a bag at my feet.  It got very dirty and started jamming.  A gun that jams is nothing but a chunk of steel when you need protection.

I took my Glock to Neil Blalock at Mid-Georgia Gunsmithing and a couple days later had it back, clean and with an action smooth as warm butter.  I was very happy with his price and fast service.  If you have guns that need cleaning or repair, call him at 770-584-5892 or visit his web site at www.georgiagunsmith.com.

Loving Warm January Weather, And It Is NOT Unprecedented

I loved the warm January weather while fishing the Flint River club tournament last Sunday at Jackson. 

Many folks are claiming this weather is unusual for January. I even heard one talking head using the most over used word in our vocabulary right now – “unprecedented.” 

On Sunday. January 21, 1967, my senior year in high school, Harold and I talked at church about how warm it was and that we needed to go water skiing.  We wanted to be the first ones to go skiing that year.  As soon as church was over, we went home, changed clothes and grabbed some extra jeans and shirts.

On the way to the lake WBBQ radio station in Augusta said it was 71 degrees and it was sunny.  We got to Raysville Boat Club where my family’s ski boat was tied under a boat shed.  As we pulled up to the lake, we saw one of our friends that had skipped church that day out of the water skiing.

Harold and I both skied, but we were not the first that year. There have been many other very warm Januaries over the years, and many very cold ones. And there will be many more as the weather changes year to year.