Sunday, August 21, 2016

August 21, 2016 - Good luck fishing?


Went fishing, as i was putting in, on this beautiful, sunny, azure-skies sort of day, some benevolent soul wished me "good luck," so of course a torrential downpour hit.


Saying good luck in theater is considered a major faux pas, because someone at some point said "good luck" and the entire cast of some play, like Hamlet, for example, was lost to some malady like typhoid or "the vapors."  Consequently, now when theater people want to wish someone well, they say "break a leg" which seems mean-spirited to the uninitiated, but in fact is a recognition that saying "good luck" is almost guaranteed to fuck up your day.

Fishermen, and the people who want to wish fishermen well, universally say "good luck," which, in my experience, is an omen of impending bad weather, no fish, and falling in the lake with a stiff breeze carrying the boat away.  Consequently, I propose to the fishing community, putting into place a different well-wish.

Similar to theatre, I believe that it should be something that appears to be malevolent, like something a psychopath with different color eyes and a hat made out of human ass-skin would say.  So when you mean, "good luck fishing," you actually say something like:
"Swim with the fishes, asshole"
or 
"I hope your tongue sloughs off"
or
"Hope you don't fall overboard and get mouthed to death by ravenous carp!"

I admit, the last of those is a bit of a mouthful, and might be seen as overdoing it.

Anyway, lets resolve to come up with something other than "good luck"  no later than January 2017.

With all the rain lately, quite a bit of delta has been developed in the upper end of Mountain Run lake:

Never seen these before, but maybe there are some sort of freshwater mussels in here:


And here are some pictures of a cicada killer wasp and a velvet ant:




Swim with the fishes, reader!

Sunday, August 7, 2016

August 7, 2016 - Tidal Rappahannock

Put in at Wilmont's Landing, water was muddy, weather was nice.


The shore adjacent in this area is a national wildlife refuge, and the osprey's have taken advantage of that.  The number of osprey nest's was almost innumerable.  There were maybe 6 or 7 that I saw, here are 3.

Osprey nest 1:
 Osprey nest 2: See osprey center-frame, eyeing my canoe.  Is that lustful hunger I see in her eyes, or just the ambivalence that birds seem to examine their surroundings with?

Osprey nest 3:  Can you imagine being a newly-hatched osprey looking down from this perch?
Nothing much else happened, caught a catfish.