I like to make New Year’s resolutions that are more like wishes since I really don‘t follow them like I should. The beginning of a new year is always a good time to think about what we want to do better in the coming year and how we can improve ourselves. When making wishes about the outdoors it can be a lot of fun, too.

For everyone else my wishes don’t require much work. They are just things I hope people do and have fun, and maybe think about a little. If you like these New Year’s wishes adopt them. If not, make your own and enjoy the next year.

For all fishermen I hope you catch the biggest fish of your life and thrill to the excitement of landing it and sharing your catch with friends. I hope you go fishing one day and land so many fish you can brag about it without exaggerating. But I also hope you go fishing one day and don’t get a bite, and realize at the end of the day that you still had a great day and there is nothing you would rather do.

For hunters I hope the deer have huge racks, the birds fly into your shot pattern, the turkey fall in love with your calls and the squirrels move around to your side of the tree when you throw a stick to the other side. I hope every time you kill an animal you stop for a minute and regret that it had to die to fulfill the hunting tradition. May you always clean and eat all of your kill, enjoy the bounties of the outdoors, and realize it is part of the natural world.

For bass fishermen may you release almost all the fish you catch, especially the big ones, but may you also take a few home to cook without any bad feelings. Realize fish populations are a renewable resource and you can keep some without hurting the future.

May every child have an adult that will take time to show them how to safely load and carry a gun, and how to be careful every second they are using one. And may that person take them squirrel hunting and let them experience the excitement of stalking a bushytail while it scampers around feeding on acorns. Maybe that training will pay off when it comes to big game at some point, too.

I hope every adult has a kid they can share a day with and let their excitement and exuberance remind you of how it feels. Maybe sharing that feeling with them will re-kindle some of those feelings that have seemed to fade in you over time. And sharing the day will make memories for both of you that will last from now on.

This year I hope you enjoy all the toys that can make being outdoors more fun. Fish out of a big fast bass boat and use a GPS to find a honey hole. Use the most modern rods and reels spooled with high-tech line and throw a $25 lure to catch a bass. But also sit on the dock on a pond with a cane pole and a can of worms and watch a cork float in the ripples, waiting on it to quiver and go under.

Don’t go hunting and concentrate so hard on killing a trophy buck you miss the cardinal that lands in a nearby dogwood to eat berries. Watch a squirrel and try to figure out why we call them gray squirrels and they look gray but don’t have a single gray hair on their bodies. And look up when you hear the distant trilling and think about the huge distances migratory birds travel when a flock of sand hill cranes fly over.

Spend some time flying down a big reservior at 70 miles per hour heading to honey hole full of bass but also spend some time easing along a small creek, dabbling a hand tied fly in the pools for bream and small bass. Enjoy the beauty of every fish you catch, noting the bright colors of a spawning bluegill and the intricate patterns on spotted bass.

Take time to smell the outdoors and note how it changes with the weather and places you visit. Catch a whiff of wood smoke on a freezing cold morning while out on a lake and feel warm just from the smell. Listen to the sounds of nature and note how fog mutes them and seems to make the whole world hush.

If I could make these wishes for all who enjoy the outdoors I would try to make sure they were good ones. But most of all, I hope and wish everyone gets to spend time fishing and hunting and enjoying nature.

I grew up in Dearing, Georgia, a wide spot on Highway 78 in McDuffie County, Georgia between Thomson and Augusta. Our claim to fame was a caution light at the crossroads at Iron Hill Road. My house was on a small farm a quarter of a mile from that caution light.

Town consisted of six small stores that included a gas station, a tiny grocery store and four stores where you could buy anything you needed, from gas and kerosene to frozen food and bullets. They were true country stores and many shopped in them for clothes, fishing supplies, canned food and cigarettes. Hoop cheese was one of my favorites and you could get any size slab you wanted.

The proprietors of two of those stores also drove school buses. They would run their routes in the morning then open the store. When time to run their afternoon route their wives kept the stores open while they were gone. I rode Mr. John Harry’s bus from kindergarten through my senior year in high school.

One year Mr. John Harry and Mr. Joe Frank made a pact they were going fishing ever single day the next year. And they did. They would fish every weekend but also kept a rod and reel on their bus and often stop at a farm pond or creek crossing on the way home in the morning or afternoon for a little fishing.

This New Year’s Resolution sounded like a perfect one for me and one I wanted to make each year since then. When I retired in 2001 I tried but never was able to fish ever day. Something always messed me up, like surgery on my thumb or a trip on a cruise ship, where there is water, water everywhere but no way to fish!

For several years my efforts ranged from missing seven to 25 days. That is not bad out of 365 days in a year, but not perfect. Then in 2009, I fished some every single day of the year! I finally did it.

My rules were fairly simple. I don’t have to catch a fish every day, but I have to fish somewhere that I could catch a fish. So no fishing in the bathtub or in a rain filled ditch. And there is no time limit. Some days I stand on one foot in my bass boat for ten hours casting for bass, others days I sat in a folding chair on my dock for ten minutes catching bluegill on pellet fish food.

Some days tried my determination to fish every day. On a week long trip to St. Louis to attend an outdoor writers meeting, I stayed at a hotel. There was a small creek with a pond on it on the hotel property but I was told no fishing was allowed. I let everyone know how stupid it was to have an outdoor writers meeting at a place that didn’t allow fishing, but their rule made me explore the Bush Wildlife Area just outside town, a beautiful place open to the public that included over 20 ponds that I could fish. The Budweiser beer people made this place available to the public and is a fantastic resource for people in the area.

I found out the third day of the conference no one watched the pond for fishermen so I did wet a line there, too. I saw some small fish around the edges but didn’t catch anything.

Another tough day was when I had a doctor appointment in Mobile, Alabama and had to leave early in the morning for it. I drove out to my place at daylight and fished for a few minutes before leaving. I was determined not to let anything mess up my record that year.

I fished when it was so cold I had to dip my rod tip in the water to melt ice from the guides to days sweat dripped from my nose and ran into my eyes constantly. And I fished in Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Wisconsin and Missouri and caught largemouth, smallmouth and spotted bass as well as crappie, bluegill, green sunfish, shell cracker, bullheads, flathead catfish, hybrids, stripers, rock bass, gar, carp, bowfin, walleye, muskie and northern pike.

I kept logs on my old web site forum listing each day fishing and what I caught. It is a good way for me to keep up. It was been a fun year. I actually fished every day between November 2, 2008 and the end of the year. That was 424 days in a row. Maybe I will get tired of fishing some day, but not yet!

Gotta go fishing – Day 3 of 2010!

What is the best Christmas gift you ever received? Mine all seem to deal with the outdoors, from fishing and hunting supplies to camping gear. Getting up on Christmas morning and discovering what Santa had left me was always thrilling. And there were always presents from my parents, too.

When I was 15 my parents gave me and my brother Mitchell 300 spinning reels and matching Abu Garcia rods. I used my outfit for many years, catching anything that swam in ponds and lakes around my house, including bream, catfish, bass and crappie. I still have that old Mitchell in my garage. Long past its usable days, I keep it to remind me of those great times.

There was always a variety of hooks, sinkers and corks in my stocking, and they were real corks, the kind you had to split with a knife so you could put it on your line. Fortunately I got a knife pretty much every Christmas, too. I used my pocket knifes for everything from splitting corks to cleaning squirrels, and we played games like mumbly peg with them, too.

After Crème came out with “rubber” worms I got a pack of every color they made. Red or black worms were your choices back then. And there was usually a Hula Popper, Snagless Sally or Creek Chub lure to cast for bass. I wore them all out.

I got a BB gun when I was six after having my tonsils taken out and every Christmas after that for several years I got several tubes of BBs under the tree. When I graduated to a .22 rifle and a .410 shotgun I always got a brick of .22 bullets and some shells.

Those ten boxes of 50 bullets in a carton meant many hours of shooting squirrels, birds and targets. But they didn’t last all year so I had to go up to Mr. John Harry’s store fairly often and buy them one box at a time, for 50 cents! And I got a couple of boxes of .410 shells to shoot rabbits and shoot at birds. I could always hit rabbits much better than doves and quail with that single shot gun.

Clothes were always under the tree but I didn’t pay much attention to the school clothes. But my eyes lit up when I got a camo jacket, a set of Duckback briar proof pants and coat or boot sox. I knew I would be doing things I loved when wearing then, as opposed to when the school clothes were worn.

Things were more simple back then. There were lots of fun things from cap pistols and rolls of caps to boxes of sparklers. And fruit was included in the stockings. Bananas, apples and oranges as well as pecans were always there. Strangely enough, the oranges looked exactly like the naval oranges in the big bag we had brought back from our annul Christmas visit to my grandmother in Ocala, Florida. And the pecans looked just like the ones we had been picking up in the yard that fall.

Each year there was one big gift, too. One year I got a shooting range thing that had ducks that revolved on a pole and I shot at them with a gun and rubber stopper bullets. And I will never forget the bicycle I got one Christmas. It still makes my heart ache when I think about it.

Daddy was the Ag teacher at the local school. One afternoon just before the holidays I went out to the shop. There were two bicycles hanging there. Daddy had bought two old bikes, repaired them, sanded them and painted them. I knew immediately they were for me and my brother for Christmas.

When I got my bicycle I was disappointed it was not a new one and I was a little embarrassed about it. But I rode that bicycle everywhere, going squirrel hunting with my .22 on the handlebars or fishing with my tackle box in the basket and my rod and reel across the handlebars.

It was few year later, when I was a little older and wiser, that it hit me that daddy could not afford a new bicycle for me and my brother. So he found something he could afford and worked many hours to make them look brand new. I realized how much love and care went into those bicycles and I am ashamed of my self, even after over 50 years, of how I felt when I first got it.

Decorating the house was always fun, too. And we used home-made ornaments mostly, from stars made with left over foil to toothpicks stuck into sweet gum balls and painted. There was the annual trip to the old house site overgrown with what mama called Smilax, what I know now as green briar. It stayed green all winter and we outlined the door with it and put a red home-made bow on the door.

My job was to find the tree, so all fall when hunting rabbits and quail I watched for the perfect cedar growing in old abandoned fields. There were always hundreds of them and it took a lot of effort to find the perfect one. When I did we would go to it the week before CHristms in our old truck and cut it down. I still love the smell of cedar in the house this time of year.

I think Christmas has changed too much in my lifetime. I hope you will still share some of the old ways this year.