Category Archives: Fishing Ramblings – My Fishing Blog

Random thoughts and musings about fishing

Why Am I A One Issue Voter?

I admit it. I am a one-issue voter. I will never vote for any politician that thinks making it harder for law-abiding citizens like me to get a gun or ammo will do anything to stop gun crime. And as a bonus, I usually find the candidates that oppose gun control also agree with my feelings on most other issues, too.

Gun control is one of those issues that pits individual liberties and responsibility of the individual against those that think government can solve all problems. Supporters of gun control want to pass even more laws that have no effect on people that use a gun for crime. How can any rational person, politician or anybody else, think someone willing to commit murder will be affected in any way by laws restricting the availability of guns?

Blaming the gun for crimes and trying to control access to them is like blaming the drugs for addiction and trying to control access to them. It simply does not work. If it did there would be no illegal drug use. It is also like blaming the match for arson. Guns don’t go out and shoot someone by themselves any more than a match goes out and lights a fire without someone striking it.

Some may think eliminating guns will keep criminals from getting them. If there are no legal guns, like there is no legal heroin or cocaine, they somehow think gun crime will be eliminated. Heroin and cocaine prove the illogic of that position.

Recent events in the US and Canada have drawn the usual whines for even more gun control. In Canada a terrorists used a 30-30 lever action rifle to kill a soldier and shoot up the parliament building. I just kept waiting for someone to call the rifle that has been around for over 100 years a “semiautomatic assault style weapon.”

In the US, police were attacked by a terrorists using a hatchet. Wonder if it was semiautomatic? In a school shooting a student brought a handgun to school and killed two of his classmates and shot others, The big question has been “where did he get the gun.” As Hillary would say, “What difference does it make?”

Why did he do it? Would he have done something similar, or worse, for example some kind of bomb, if he had not gotten a gun? Immediately the Brady Bunch, who used to be called Handgun Control, Inc and now renamed the Brady Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, sent out fund raising letters and emails. They want to somehow stop kids with mental problems from getting their parents guns. How? By eliminating all guns?

There are insane people in our world and there are mean, evil people, too. They will find some kind of weapon to do violence on those that abhor it. If no one had a gun, what would they use? And in the two above cases, a good guy with a gun shot and stopped the terrorists.

If guns caused problems there would be a high murder rate in deer camps, where every fall folks sit around for days within easy reach of high powered rifles, often the dreaded semiautomatic weapon type. Yet you never hear of a shooting in a deer camp.

If guns caused problems it would be unsafe to walk into a store selling guns. From Walmart to Berrys Sporting Goods, racks of guns sit calmly and don’t shoot anyone. In fact, there are a bunch of guns in my house, all loaded and ready to shoot, but they have never shot anyone.

Gun safety is important. If there were young kids in my house I would teach them to leave guns alone unless an adult was present, but I would store guns and ammo separately and lock them up. Kids will be kids and accidents will happen, but teaching safety will go a long way to preventing them.

I got my first .22 when I was eight years old, and had been shooting a BB gun for about three years before I got it. Gun safety was instilled in me from the time I was old enough to understand danger and guns were part of my life every day. All my friends had guns and from the time we were about ten years old we were allowed to hunt together, since our parents knew they had taught us well. And we never had an accident or intentionally shot another person.

Guns are inanimate objects. They have no will of their own. Only people have the ability to do harm with them. Getting rid of guns or making it difficult for careful, law-abiding folks will do nothing to stop those with a will to do harm.

Be wary of politicians supporting gun control. They don’t trust you and guns are not the only one of your liberties they want to control.

Summertime Fishing As A Kid

Summertime fishing during my pre-teen years was always fantastic – whether I caught anything or not. From fishing for tiny cats and bream in the branch below my house to riding my bicycle to local farm ponds to try to catch bass, I fished almost every day.

Dearing branch provided some of my early learning experiences about fish behavior. When we were not damming it up or swimming in it, we fished. In a small branch you get up close and personal with the fish. I could watch how they used stumps, limbs in the water, current and other structure to hide and get food. Fish in big lakes act much the same way, just on a large scale. And hopefully, the fish are larger also!

I made my own “flies” for fishing the branch. It was quite a thrill the first time I got a six inch branch minnow to hit one of my creations of chicken feathers and sewing thread. I am sure the action of making it vibrate on the top of the water like a fallen insect was more important than the way it looked, but it worked. I thought I was really an artist, but found I needed bought lures to catch bass, my favorite.

To this day my bass boat is loaded with way more tackle than a dozen people could use in a week. One of my first tackle boxes – and I still have it – was a huge Old Pal box about two feet long. My folks got me a basket for my bicycle one Christmas and had to look all over Augusta to find one big enough to hold my tackle box.

With my tackle box in the basket and my rod and reel across the handlebars, I was ready to go to any pond within three or four miles. If I caught any fish they dangled on a stringer from one handlebar on the way home. I hardly ever went alone, my two friends and I traveled in a pack when we went fishing. That added to the fun.

I always had a few hooks, some line and a couple of sinkers and corks in a little box in my pocket. With my trusty – or maybe rusty – pocket knife I could cut a limb and be fishing in minutes. If there was a cane patch nearby I was in heaven with a real cane pole!

One summer my folks rented a cabin at Vogel State Park for a week. I could not wait to get to the clear mountain stream full of trout and try out my flies. I was eight years old and I knew those rainbows I had read about would just eat up my creation. How wrong I was!

After a couple of fruitless days of fishing the stream in front of the cabin and catching nothing, even with the live worms I had given in and tried, I decided the lake a mile or so downstream was where the fish were hiding. I also thought I needed to be there at the crack of dawn to catch them. I swear I told my folks I was going fishing early the next morning. I think they just didn’t remember with all the vacation excitement, but they were quite relieved when they found me mid-morning, sitting on a rental boat tied to the bank at the marina, catching tiny bream and bass on my earthworms and cut pole.

I had gotten up before anyone else and walked to the lake to fish. My parents found me when they asked a couple of teenage girls out walking around if they had seen a lost child. They told them of the “Huckleberry Finn” they had seen – barefoot but wearing a straw hat, sitting on the boat with a tree branch pole catching fish.
They didn’t get too mad. As a matter of fact, my mom told me years later that she didn’t worry about me as long as I was fishing. She thought a guardian angel watched over kids out trying to catch fish. They let me grow up pretty wild, and I thank them for it.

Camping Out

When you first realize you aren’t tucked in your own bed, your next waking sensation is the smell of canvas. Anyone who has ever camped in their back yard as a kid will never forget that smell. It meant adventure, freedom, fear and many other emotions all rolled into one. From the old army surplus pup tents to fancy Sears tents with floors, I spent many happy nights in them.

Camping out was one of the rites of summer while I was growing up. We organized our overnight stays as well as any expedition to climb Mt. Everest. Each of us had specific things to bring for the group, and each one of us also had their own private treasures. We brought so much stuff we could not have carried it further than our back yards.

Mess kits and matches were all we needed to cook our breakfast of bacon, eggs and toast over an open fire. The bacon was always half burned and half rubbery undercooked, but all delicious. Toast, as soon as it turned a perfect golden brown, was either dropped into the fire or left a little longer to blacken. Eggs stuck to the pan and had to be scraped off as they were eaten.

For supper, we discovered “hobo meals” at church camp. A hamburger patty was placed on a square of tin foil, sliced potatoes, carrots and onion stacked on top of it and all was topped with a hunk of butter. Sealed up and cooked on the campfire coals, it was moist and tender, I was told, if you didn’t stick a hole in the tinfoil while cooking it. I never had one cooked that way. Mine always managed to get stuck.

For desert we always had somemores. They were graham crackers with a Hershey bar and a toasted marshmallow on top. We go more on our hands and face than in our mouth, but they were still great, and you could lick for a long time and make the flavor last.

Sleeping was also an adventure. Each of us boys had our sleeping bags, which we placed directly on the ground for years. We got used to scrounging around until we got comfortable on the rocks and limbs we didn’t remove before spreading the bag out. Then one of us got an air mattress. What a joke. I do not remember even one that was still inflated shortly after blowing it up. We tried every time though.

Once we got the bright idea of sleeping on a lawn lounge chair. That worked if you didn’t mind the bar across your back all night long. And it was tough to roll over in your bag in the chair. We used them often, though. They were still better than the ground.

Something else I will never forget is the way your voice sounded when waking up early in a tent. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, maybe it was the tent itself, but we always sounded funny to each other and ourselves. We never camped more than one night during the weekend because we needed the other night to recover!
Sometimes I think I would like to do that kind of camping again. Then I remember how much I ache getting out of a nice soft bed in the morning and realize backyard camping is best left to the young!

Should My Taxes Pay For Those Trying To Win The Darwin Award?

This Week’s Lead Candidate for the Darwin Award

By Frank Sargeant, Editor
from The Fishing Wire

You just know this is going to end badly

You just know this is going to end badly

My personal candidate for this week’s Darwin Award, given to those who are kind enough to attempt removing themselves from the gene pool to avoid transmitting their aberrations to offspring, goes to Iranian-born U.S. citizen Reza Baluchi, who tried to “walk” to Bermuda from South Florida in what looked very much like an oversized vinyl beach ball, in an attempt to “spread a message of world unity.”

He made it all of 70 miles offshore of St. Augustine before requiring rescue.

The Coast Guard located him early in his mission, but after he refused to leave his device, the watchstanders monitored his movements until he activated a locator beacon Saturday morning due to fatigue. Coast Guard aircraft out of Clearwater began searching for him.

According to the Coast Guard news service, an aircrew arrived on scene and safely “hoisted Baluchi from his inflatable raft and transported him to Air Station Clearwater where emergency medical services evaluated him.”

Baluchi seems like the sort who might believe he actually could walk on water, but we must point out that the distance from St. Augustine to Bermuda is approximately 990 miles, and he appeared to be making about 1 to 2 mph per hour in his beach ball on the way to making the Arabs love the Israeli’s.

The trip would have taken him 20 to 40 days, if he was able to hold up day and night, which of course he could not have. His supplies were primarily several cans of Red Bull, water and some protein bars, from what we can ascertain.

So we have to conclude either that Baluchi is wacky, or that he knew from the get go he was going to have to be rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard at the expense of American taxpayers, and with the cameras rolling.

How much might it cost for his rescue? The Coast Guard is not saying, but it used an HC-130 airplane, which costs about $20,000 per operational hour, to locate him, and an MH-60 helicopter, which operates at an economical $14,000 per hour, to rescue him.

You can be sure he would not have tried this stunt off the coast of his native Iran or anywhere else outside the western world and put his faith in the local water patrol, but in our waters, he knew that he was reasonably safe after publicizing the event in advance, thanks to the remarkable capabilities of our life saving services.

This sort of incredibly stupid stuff is becoming epidemic with the wide-spread and immediate publicity available to publicity hounds of all flavors via YouTube, Facebook and other social media outlets, and it is starting to become a real issue in terms of taking away time and money from legitimate search and rescue efforts

It would seem reasonable to require all such stunts to be registered with the Coast Guard, and to require that a bond be posted if rescue is expected. That way, those who actually do want to take a serious run at whatever challenge they can dream up will still have the complete freedom to do so, but at their own risk–no bond, no rescue.

Otherwise, the publicity that Baluchi and others like him get, even when they fail, will continue to inspire more with a very limited understanding of what they are getting into to make these attempts–at our expense.

Eating Strange Wild Critters

Tree Rats

Fried squirrel. Squirrel stew. BBQ squirrel. Squirrel and dumplings. Baked squirrel. Squirrel enchiladas. Squirrel chill. Squirrel cacciatore. Squirrel fricassee. Just how many ways are there to cook tree rats?

All the above recipes can be found on the internet, and I have tried many of them. But the best squirrel I ever ate was way back in the woods by Germany Creek. Joe and I had been camping for four days and had been eating nothing but the C-rations he brought and some loaf bread and peanut butter and jelly I supplied.

I had my .22 along for snake control and decided to shoot a squirrel one afternoon. We boiled that critter in my mess kit pot in creek water. No salt, no seasoning, no nothing added. But the meat was the first solid meat we had had, and when that juice was sopped up with the bread it was fantastic.

I was 16 at he time and had been eating squirrel all my life. Back in the late 1950s and early 60s when I was growing up, it was a rite of passage for boys to go squirrel hunting. From the time I was eight years old I was roaming the fall woods looking for targets in the trees for my .22 or .410. And I killed a bunch of them.
It was an unbreakable rule we ate everything we killed back then, so I had to skin and gut the squirrels when I got home and mom would cook them up the next day, after soaking them overnight in saltwater in the refrigerator. And she could cook them in several ways.

One of my favorite meals was fried squirrel with gravy, served over hot homemade biscuits.
She cooked chicken the same way and both were good. And the whole family ate the squirrels, with no complaining. We were just happy to have lots to eat.

I still kill a lot of squirrels and eat them each fall and winter. They gnawed into my attic so I keep a 12 gauge shotgun loaded with #6 shot by the door and shoot every one I see. I would rather shoot them with my .22 but there are just too many houses around for it.

Recently I smoked a squirrel and it was delicious! I put it in the smoker with lots of hickory for a couple of hours and the smoky flavor was great. I ate it as a snack rather than a meal because it was so good I ate the whole thing when “sampling” it!

I don’t really like cleaning them but it is pretty easy. When I was a kid pulling the skin off was a chore, and as I get older it seems to be getting harder again. But so far it is not too much trouble to be worth it.

One critter I ate was very good, but I will never try to skin one again. I shot a beaver in one of my ponds several years ago and decided to eat it. I didn’t think I would ever get it skinned. I had to cut off every tiny bit of the skin, there was no pulling it off. Starting at the lower legs I slowly trimmed between the meat and skin until I got the back half done. At that point I decided the front part didn’t have enough meat to mess with.

That was the reddest meat I have ever seen. I boiled it first, then floured and sautéed it in olive oil. Then I put it in a pan with potatoes, onions and carrots and baked it. It tasted just like a beef pot roast to me. From now own, since I can say I ate a beaver, I will buy a beef pot roast!

Gar also are tasty but very hard to skin. You can’t scale them, their scales are like armor plating. I was shown how to use tin snips and cut up the back, then peel the skin and scales to the side and cut out the meat down the backbone. It is tedious, hard work.

The meat sautéed in butter tastes like Florida lobster to me, kinds of chewy a little with some slight smoky fish flavor. But I found an easier way to cook them. I cut one gar into foot long chunks with a hack saw after gutting it then put it on the grill.

When it was cooked the skin and scales peeled off easily and the meat was even better! From now on, that is how I will cook them. If you run trotlines, jugs or bank hooks with live bait you will catch a bunch of them and you can also shoot them with a bow!

Give some unusual critter a try. You might find it tasty!

Does Georgia Power Help Fishermen and the Environment?

I enjoyed fishing at Lake Juliette with Jack “Zero” Ridgeway last Sunday. We were checking out spots for a November Georgia Outdoor News article and caught a lot of bass. The biggest one hooked, a five pounder, jumped a couple of times then got Zero’s line around the trolling motor and broke off.

While we were fishing I kept looking at the smokestacks and cooling towers at the Georgia Power Plant Scherer on the shore. It is a huge facility, the fifth biggest coal fired power plant in the US. It provides electricity for many homes and businesses around here through the Georgia Power Company, Municipal Elect5ric Authority of Georgia, (MEAG) Oglethorpe Power and others.

When we think of Georgia Power we think of power. But when we flip a switch to turn on a light, do a load of clothes or warm food in the microwave it is automatic and we only notice when the power goes out and we don’t have this incredible resource that makes our lives so much easier.

Georgia Power is so much more than just a power company, though. Without them, Lake Juliette, Jackson Lake, Lake Sinclair, Lake Oconee and many others in our area and state would not exist. If you fish or hunt on and around those lakes you can thank Georgia Power.

Many of the boat ramps, picnic areas and campgrounds on Georgia Power lakes are either fully run by Georgia Power or are supported by them with money and facilities. Hunting areas are usually funded by a combination of funds from Georgia Power and the Georgia DNR. And many water fowl projects are a combined effort with Ducks, Unlimited and Georgia Power.

While Zero and I were fishing we heard several quick shotgun blasts early in the morning. Zero said someone must be hunting ducks and I responded there was an early teal season and also goose hunting was open.

All around Lake Juliette there are special waterfowl areas supported by Georgia Power where fields are planted with food ducks and geese like. With the lake right there it is excellent habitat for both. And some of the fields on Rum Creek WMA are managed for doves and are open to the public for shooting at those gray rockets.

Wildlife Management Areas around many lakes are open to the public for deer hunting and many of them are on Georgia Power land. Without them, a lot of deer hunters would have a tough time finding a place to hunt. And they are open small game hunting, too, and managed for all kinds of wildlife. Georgia Power helps fund these areas and provides the land for them.

Fishing is good on Georgia Power lakes and the shoreline on most is owned by the company. Folks with cabins and houses lease many of their lots from the company. Not only do these leases provide great places for the homeowner, the docks they build are great cover for bass, crappie and bream.
Other than the docks, Georgia Power works with the DNR to build fish habitat in the lakes from putting out marked brush piles to planting different kinds of native grasses around the lake. Water quality is monitored by Georgia Power, too.

Lake Sinclair is special to many area bass fishermen in the winter. The warm water discharged from Plant Branch, the coal fired power plant there, warms the lake a little and makes fish bite better in the winter. Due to Environmental Protection Agency regulations, the federal government seems to be trying to shut down such power plants.

Plant Branch is being closed to meet EPA regulations, at a great cost to the company, its employees and its customers. If the current federal government had it way all coal fired power plants would be shut down, and they don’t care how much doing that would raise power costs or the fact electricity might become less reliable due to lowered generating ability.

Some folks complain companies don’t pay enough taxes. They don’t pay any taxes. Their customers and stock owners pay them. So increasing taxes on companies just raise taxes on people like you and me. And you can own some of Georgia Power and get your share of their profits by buying stock. At less than $30 a share right now, it is a good way to build equity and get decent return on your investment.

Everyone complains about their power bill, and Georgia Power offers many ways to conserve electricity and keep it lower. But think what you get for your payment. Could you live around here without an air conditioner in August? Could you do without a refrigerator, microwave, TV, clothes washer or any of the other things you depend on daily?

When you flip a switch to light up a dark room, hunt on a Georgia Power facility or fish on one of their lakes, think about what the company does to make those things happen!

Global Warming and Fishing

Remember the Polar Vortex last winter that produced record cold weather around here and all over the US and the northern hemisphere? The extremely cold days and nights that lasted several days each time it hit? It was produced by a change in wind patterns that brought artic cold further south than normal. The terrible cold made hunting and fishing miserable.

A team of scientists from the US and Korea have come up with the reason, and I guess their conclusions should come as no surprise even if they don’t make sense. The reason? Global warming, of course.

You gotta wonder how scientists can “prove” or even theorize that warming produces record cold. That just shows you can “prove” anything you want to. Right now there is big money behind any efforts to prove global warming exists, and researchers know they won’t get funded unless they produce the desired results.

The whole theory of colder winters due to global warming is based on the Artic ice cap getting smaller. Strangely enough, the data does not show a shrinking ice cap for the past few years. Instead, according to the “National Snow and Ice Data Center,” the Artic ice melt this year has been lower than last year, and the extent of the ice cap size will set a record this winter and will continue to increase.

Some believe in global warming based on their past experiences. They might say this summer was the hottest they can remember, without looking at temperature records. Or for a while winters were claimed to be warmer, again not looking at temperature records.

My experiences make me think we have weather, not climate change. For years I spent Christmas holidays at Clarks Hill. One year, two days before Christmas, I had been fishing barefoot and shirtless for several days. But other years I had to wear a snowmobile suit during the same time period.

When I was working on my first Masters Degree in the mid 1970e at West Georgia College I had to write a report on the coming ice age. I used information from Time magazine the month the cover proclaimed scientists predicted a new ice age within 20 years or so, and articles explained how we would suffer from the extreme cold in coming years.

There is a lot at stake for us on how this debate turns out. One claimed way to lessen global warming is to reduce coal use. But even if we reduce it in the US, and we have been doing that for years with no new coal fired power plants approved for a long time, what other effects will it have?

Almost all of our electricity around here comes from coal even though we have a lot of hydroelectric power dams in Georgia. The coal fired plant in Forsyth is the biggest in the US, and uses an incredible amount of coal each day. If such plants are shut down expect your power rates to get much, much higher and less reliability of power supply.

I hate it when the power goes out, or even when it is reduced in a brown out due to storms. Electrical motors and appliances do not work right. Expect that to be the rule, rather than the exception, if we shut down coal fired power plants.

Georgia Power is already working on closing the coal fired power plant on Lake Sinclair. It has been reduced to one working boiler if my information is correct. Why are they shutting this plant? Because new EPA rules require them to make upgrades that cost so much it is not economically feasible to do them.

One effect of shutting that plant down will be no more warm water released into Beaverdam Creek. That warm water keeps most of the lake downstream a little warmer than other lakes around here. The warmer water makes bass bite better. Almost every bass club in middle Georgia schedule winter tournaments there for that reason.

The effect on fish and wildlife is another claim the true believers in global warming make is something else I find hard to take for true. Computer models predict about a four degree warming in the next one hundred years. Even though the computer models have been far off in their predictions for the past 20 years, assume they are right.

Game and fish undergo changes in water and air temperature of many degrees each day. For wildlife, last week is a good example. In the mornings we had temperatures in the low sixties that climbed into the eighties each afternoon. That is over 20 degree in a few hours. So how is a change of four degrees in one hundred years going to make a difference?

In August the surface water temperature on area lakes was in the upper eighties. By late October they will be in the seventies, and by February in the low forties. That is a fifty degree change in six months. So four degrees in one hundred years is going to kill off all our fish?

When global warming claims make more sense I will believe them.

Using A Tragedy To Push the Gun Control Agenda

Last Monday, August 25, 2014, a nine year old girl was at a gun range near Las Vegas being taught to shoot a Uzi gun by an instructor. She lost control of the gun and the instructor was shot in the head, killing him.

This tragedy was immediately grabbed by the gun control fanatics and all kinds of claims were made. The girl’s parents took her to the range as a present, and the instructor had been trained in teaching firearms use. I am sure the girl is traumatized and all involved would do anything to have kept it from happening.

Many have blamed the girl’s family, claiming they should never have allowed her to shoot, and the gun range for allowing young shooters to fire guns. Demands range from banning guns to not allowing kids to shoot guns to closing gun ranges.

Regardless of what you think about families making decisions for their children, and what you thing about guns, tragedies happen. Not just with guns, but with everything in life. There is no way to stop them but gun tragedies are treated differently by those that hate guns.
In 2011, the last year I could find information, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports 677 people killed on bicycles in the US, and about 65 of them were 14 years old or younger. That is more than one child killed each week. Yet there are no calls for banning bicycles, not allowing kids to ride them or closing bicycle shops.

Some claim guns are not needed by anyone in the US. Neither are bicycles. Some claim guns are only made for killing people. Go to the Griffin Gun Club during one of our many shoots and you will see hundreds of folks using guns, and none of them are using them to kill people.

This is the first time something like this tragedy has ever happened. Many claim thousands of children are killed each year by guns, In 2010 1544 “children” eighteen years old or younger were killed by guns. No report on how many 17 and18 year old gang banners were in that number. And no mention of the number of kids killed by drive by shootings where bullets are fired at houses by gang members with illegal guns.

Life is dangerous. There is no way to remove all dangers. But don’t single out guns just because you fear or don’t like them.
–

Goodbye To Summer

Goodbye to Summer? Nah.
by Jim Shepherd
from The Fishing Wire

As I was battling putting the cover on the boat yesterday morning, I still managed to admire gorgeous summertime weather. And I was thinking about this “official end to summer” thing that’s supposed to be the ultimate meaning of Labor Day.

It’s not.

Heck, it’s not the official last hurrah for kids before school starts back either. Kids have been back in school for a couple of weeks here, and in some places they don’t really have a summer vacation. When you hear someone shrieking at you that this weekend is “the official back to school shopping weekend” ignore them, too.

Ditto the big “Sell A Thons” that are in every commercial break on every TV and cable station right now. Bogus “events” too.

End of Summer?

End of Summer?

This was what I saw as I was covering the boat yesterday morning. Does this look like the end of summer to you? Me neither. Jim Shepherd/OWDN photo.

Labor Day weekend is the weekend we’re supposed to appreciate the work of the American worker . OK, the work might not always be as up to snuff as it once was, but the reasoning hasn’t changed: this long weekend is to give workers across the country the thank you they deserve for the rest of the year’s efforts.

Unfortunately, the same people who work most of the other holidays will be working this weekend, too. And we should take time to thank them for their efforts as they wait our tables, pick up and deliver our packages, cook our restaurant meals or service our cars today so we can get on the road to relaxation.

I’m not going to beat this one to death because that’s a waste of my effort and your time. Instead, I’m simply going to thank you for continuing to accept our work in your eMail boxes all year long.

There are days we don’t think anyone notices, and those days when we hope no one’s looking because we made a bonehead error. And there are also those days when we seem to slip up and hit a nerve that brings “nastygrams” from people who seem to be waiting for any opportunity to hammer someone else’s work.

It all goes with the job- just like the occasional banged knuckle goes with working with your hands. Not that either is fun. They’re just part of the job of the job each of us does.

If you’re off this weekend, I hope you have a great time and are back with us next week when we’ll again show up in your inbox.

If you’re working this weekend, thanks. All of us appreciate it-whether we remember to tell you or not.
We’re not working over the entire weekend- but some of us will be working a large part of it. Not necessarily because we want to be working when most people aren’t, but because of a promise I made to you nearly thirteen years ago.

So…as always, we’ll keep you posted.

Sounds of Summer

A recent article in the Griffin Daily News about the sounds of summer while growing up, written by a guy that grew up in a suburb, brought back many memories. Although he had some of the same memories as me, there were many unfamiliar to this country boy, and he did not mention many that were important to me.

He told of the different ways parents had of getting their kids home in time for supper. My parents blew the car horn three times. From our house on top of a hill I could hear that distinctive sound for a very long way. And I knew I better high-tail it home since my parents insisted the whole family sit down together every night for dinner.

I was too far from any neighbors to ever here them talking, or even yelling inside their houses no matter if the windows were open or not. But at night I did hear crickets, spring peepers, the sound of distance thunder that seemed to be present every summer night, and the clucking of chickens. Since we had 11,000 laying hens and kept lights on all night to encourage laying more eggs, that sound lasted all night.

Car sounds were very unusual after dark, and not very common during the day. Before I was school age the main road that ran in front of my house was dirt. Sometime around the time I started school the county put down tar and gravel. That made for a better road, but not much. The gravel was put down in a thick layer and gravel sprayed on it. The tar kinda kept the rocks in place.

The sounds of passing cars changed from a soft grinding in the sand to a crunching as the tires ran over the rocks, and an occasional clank when a piece of gravel was thrown up into the fender well.

It was not unusual for me to come in during the summer with tar on my feet. I wore shoes only on Sunday during summer vacation from school, and walking on the road after the sun heated the tar was guaranteed to get it on my bare feet. So the sounds of me fussing about mom scrubbing my feet with turpentine to get it off was pretty common, too.

We had something else in common, that city boy and me. Apparently he lived on the edge of the suburbs since he talked about damming creeks, building tree houses and camping out. I did all that, so the sounds of hammering and sawing were pretty common, as were the sounds a shovel of sand makes hitting the pile for the dam or being poured into croaker sacks.

I will never forget the sound a butcher knife makes slicing into a cold watermelon, then the crack as it is split apart. We ate watermelon at least once a week during the summer. Since we had a walk in cooler for the eggs we always had six or eight in there ready to eat.

The sound of bacon sizzling, eggs frying and the toaster popping up were daily indoor sounds. But the bacon and eggs cooking outside while we camped out sounded different, and better, somehow.

Another sound of the summer was the whoosh of daddy’s fish fryer under the carport. It was sometimes frying fish, but much more often it was boiling water to blanch corn, string beans, okra and other vegetables from our garden that mom was freezing. His fish cooker was home made out of an old wheel rim, with a pipe in the middle that the gas line hooked to. It put out a flame thrower like column of fire that heated things up fast.

One of the most important sounds of summer to me was the plop of a cork hitting the water, or the gurgle of a Jitterbug wobbling its way across the surface of a pond. Fishing was one of my favorite activities, even back then, and I went several times each week. It didn’t matter if we were fishing red wigglers dug behind the chicken house for bream or casting plugs for bass. I love it all, as I do now.

The sounds our bicycles made on the gravel and dirt roads, and the change to a whine when hitting asphalt ones, will always remind me of the fishing trips we made. My friends and I would ride our bicycles for several miles to farm ponds and spend a cool afternoon wading and catching supper.

I hope kids made some good memories of the sounds of summer this year.