Tammy and Dad fishing

Tammy and my dad got out yesterday for fishing. They went to a couple of lakes and got some bass. I'm hoping to get out tomorrow morning and go to Noname lake myself.

My birthday on the Delaware

It was my birthday last Thurs and I took the day off from work to go fishing. My friend Lance was on vacation so we decided to go to the Delaware river. It had rained pretty heavily the night before and the water was pretty heavily stained, basically only a couple shades short of being chocolate milk. The fishing was pretty disappointing. Lance caught one smallmouth that was not very big. I caught 2 channel cats also not that big. I caught off of a spinner so that was pretty cool. The fishing was bad but it was a great day for finding things. Lance and I were fishing a channel between 2 small islands, we were walking down the shoreline of the larger island just stopping to cast every 10 or 20 feet. Lance had stopped to make a few cats so I walked by him. About 20 feet past him I saw a small plastic bag on sure,. I saw something in so I bent to pick it up. The "something" turned out to be $63! That alone would have made the trip worthwhile but more was to come.

We stopped a couple of hundred yards further down and just threw our lines out and sat down to relax for a while. For laughs we started trying to chip rocks into arrowheads or spearheads. I picked up one rock and it turned out to have some fossil imprints of seashells. This was turning out to be a fun little trip! In about the same area we saw a bald eagle. It was the first one Lance had ever seen and only about the 2nd one I had ever seen. as we started to walk down the shoreline again. By this time I was keeping my eyes open. A good thing I was because this time I found a fishing reel! It was an Abu-Garcia reel. It wasn't a very high quality one but it was in almost perfect shape. By this time Lance and I had realized that this had turned from a simple fishing trip into one of our patented adventures.

A small digression here. Lance and I have a habit of having adventures. They aren't always good adventures though. We define an adventure as something that happens way out of the norm. Just getting lost going to a new fishing spot isn't good enough we have to get lost in a big such as winding up in the wrong county, wrong state or winding up in an area that looks as though they shot Deliverance there. Just being caught in a downpour isn't enough either. Being caught in a thunderstorm while in the middle of the river and then having to climb a 15 foot vertical wall to get out does qualify. Lance also getting poison ivy was just icing on the cake.

Okay, back to our latest adventure. After getting down to the end of the island we realized that to get back to the other end we'd have to A) walk upriver on slippery rocks with a strong current to fight. B) walk up the other side of the island through deeper water with a muddy bottom. Or C) cut overland through some very dense vegetation. We took option C since while being more painful at least didn't have the option of getting banged around by the river or finding deep mud. We found a game trail so it wasn't too nasty. We also found a small campground someone had made. It was pretty cool they had a small tent, a couple of chairs and grill setup as well as a fence made of branches. The thing that caught our eye however was the dead bird hanging from a tree. It looked an Osprey. I hope they found it dead and didn't kill it otherwise they are scumbags. After seeing that we decided it would a bad idea to look inside the tent. As Lance put it we'd either see a guy gap toothed guy with a shotgun or a dead body and neither option sounded good so we just left.

Aside from that bit of weirdness it was a very good day. I just hope next time we go to that spot the fishing is better.

Fun on the Millstone

My wife, my son David and I went to the Millstone River in Rocky Hill last week. My wife and I were very pleasantly surprised at how well he behaved. We were there for 4 hours and he behaved very well overall. My wife even managed to catch a catfish. It was a weird looking channel catfish with a huge head and small body. If the body had matched the head it would have been easily a 5 pound fish. With the small body it was only about 3 pounds. The fun part was getting her to hold it. She only has one glove for holding fish and she needed both hands. After half begging her and half yelling at her I finally got these 2 pictures. She's going to kill me for posting one of them. I think you'll all figure out which one I'm talking about. I'm also posting some pictures of David wading around in some shallow water. It took a little time for him to go in the water but once I did he loved it. This was a week or so before we all went down there. I was looking for some baby crayfish to put in my fish tank. I found 2 baby crayfish and I also caught to baby catfish. One the catfish are big enough I'll put them in the main tank. Right now they are so small they'd get eaten.

They went to Lake Champlain and all I got were these pictures

My parents went to Lake Champlain last week with my Uncle Rick and Uncle Joe. As you can see from the pictures they had a good trip. Especially my Uncle Rick. I'd would have loved to have seen the weight on the big bass he got. I'd say it was around 5- 5 1/2 pounds.




The picture of the bass being held by someone with a hairy arm is my Uncle Joe I'm pretty sure. He was the only one wearing a watch strap like that nice fish though. The smallmouth might be my favorite of the trip though. Catching a smallie that size would be a good fight with a bass rig let alone a fly rod.


The other picture of an arm with a fish is from my dad. I know he caught more then that. I'll have to get more pictures from him.

Last but not least my mom had a good trip it looks like. The largemouth bass was nice mom but Tammy and I were more impressed with that monster rockbass. That's about the biggest one I've ever seen.