July 24, 2016 - Big Blue Canoe

So, a few weeks ago, I made the trek down to Smith Mountain Lake, where a guy had a Wenonah Odyssey canoe for sale.  I picked it up.  This is an 18 1/2 feet long tripping canoe, and is pretty fast paddled tandem.  I've taken it out now twice using it as a solo, and it makes a lousy solo canoe.  The length makes it difficult to turn, and my solo seat is just a board over the gunnels, which puts me too high up to paddle effectively with any paddle I own.

That having been said, it is pretty stable, and doesn't draft much water with just me in it.

 

While I was paddling around, caught this crappie:

I caught this nice yellow perch the other day. 

March 16, 2016 - You in the patriotic shirt, shut up.

I am sitting in the Culpeper County Library typing this.  Some jerk in a shirt with the word "Freedom" in red, white and blue is yakking into a cellphone in the middle of the place.  In TV shows, the librarians don't put up with that shit, approaching loud patrons saying "Shhh!" with the sort of incipient menace you associate with annoyed bulls just before they eviscerate some toreador waving a red cape.   But here, the librarians are timid, let's-not-make-a-fuss, it's-not-my-job types, so they don't do anything about it.  And I have no authority, and this shmuck clearly doesn't have any regard for the common courtesy that normally accompanies being a member of society, so there is no point in me bringing to his attention that he is a prick. Maybe one day he'll read this, realize I was talking about him, and turn over a new leaf.  Maybe he'll be in a fatal car accident or move to Kansas.  In the meanwhile, I guess I'll just grit my teeth and tip-tap-type.

Anyway, went fishing at Dead Carp Ditch, fished for about 45 minutes and caught nothing, fishing with a white curly tail, a rubber crawdad, and a spinner.  Nothing noteworthy about it at all.

March 5 & 6 2016, Mountain Run Lake and Lake Brittle

Went to Mountain Run Lake on Saturday, fished for a while and caught one 7-8 inch bass.  I guess I could blab about some not-particularly-significant thing for a while, like the sky being the color of cornflowers, which I am to understand are blue, or the water being the color of vomit, but there doesn't seem to be any profit in it.

Sunday, however, was a day of cornflower-blue skies, and I went up to Lake Brittle, a vomit-colored  recreational impoundment in Fauquier County, near what once was Vint Hill Farms Station, a facility operated by the Army to spy on foreigners, if you believe what the man tells you, or to spy on us, if you don't.  The facility has closed though, so they (or we) are now being spied on from some other location.

According to the DGIF website, this lake was constructed using "Dingell-Johnson funds," apparently sourced from a excise tax on fishing tackle.  Damn government taking our tax dollars and giving them to the poor fishermen!  Build your own damn lake, freeloaders!

Also according to the DGIF website, this lake hosts such species as: Largemouth Bass, Bluegill, Redear Sunfish, Black Crappie and Channel Catfish, but you couldn't prove it by me, or my fellow anglers that I queried.  The lake seems pretty shallow, more of a puddle than either Pelham or Mountain Run, with a swampy, marshy character.   DGIF has a nice contour map, which I've reproduced here:

The water temperature was still cold at about 50 F.  I imagine in a month it might heat up and be worth trying again.

I've run out of bullshit to type now so I'll stop.

March 1, 2016 - Stickers

I voted today, but you wouldn't know it by looking at my shirt.  My shirt is totally unadorned with the evidence of having voted.  What am I talking about?  Those ridiculous "I voted" stickers they try to shove into your unwitting hands on your way out of the polling place.

Let me take you back a few years, to when I was younger and my mother would go to vote and she would take me with her.  Voting in "those days" was accomplished by stepping into a big steel contraption, where a curtain slid closed behind to form a sort of cloister.  I don't precisely recall, but I think there were toggle switches next to the choices, and my mother would flip the toggle switches to the positions she felt represented her views, opinions, and preferences, and then I got to pull the big lever that served to set into motion some mechanical workings that would ultimately record the vote, with a satisfying clunk to let you know you had participated in the democratic process and open the curtain to allow you your freedom.

Then "the man" got rid of the mechanical voting machine, and we now have to settle for touch screens and scantron sheets, which fall flat in eliciting the same visceral satisfaction, that feeling of pomp and ceremony that pulling that lever did. So I suppose "the man" realized that tapping a twitchy touchscreen that disregards your input and registers a vote for some cretin you despise or filling in a scantron sheet reminiscent of the SAT didn't have the same cachet, and I suppose to make up, they started giving voters stickers.

The problem with that is, anyone who either a) decides to vote but otherwise wouldn't if they wouldn't receive a sticker  or b) decides to vote because they saw a sticker on someone else, SHOULDN'T VOTE.  Anyone who wouldn't vote if not for the A-for-effort prize of a 1 inch diameter patriotic slip of paper with adhesive on the back can't possibly have a worthwhile opinion.  I spoke earlier of pulling the lever in the voting booth.  You might say, isn't it ridiculous to overemphasize the importance of pulling a lever in voting as well?  And yes it is, but I was 8 at the time, give me a break!

Not to mention it is a waste of resources in terms of the paper pulp, chemicals, etc. required to produce the stickers, having some poor soul hand them out, and the ruinous effect they will have on the environment when discarded, either on the ground, or hopefully in a landfill.

Anyway, after voting, I went fishing out at Mountain Run Lake, fished for about an hour and a half, the whole time employing a small 1/16 oz jighead with a yellow curly tail, mostly casting it and retrieving it slowly out towards the boat, moving along the bank with steeper drops.  After a while, I clipped a bobber about 2 feet above the jig and cast that a while.  Nothing doing there, so I returned to my previous strategy, except for fishing the creek mouth.  And I got a strike, which I missed, and shortly thereafter another, which I didn't, and caught this fat 11 inch crappie:

Nothing else was especially noteworthy, except that there were as many vultures there as I've ever in my life seen in one place, or maybe in total.  There were three separate flocks that I saw, here is a picture of one, with maybe 60 individuals.  There was a larger flock that had been roosting in a tree elsewhere that flew overhead as I was taking out, which was more visually impressive, but I'd left the phone in the car so I didn't get a picture of it so you'll have to stretch you imagination a bit.  You can really only see the birds in this picture if you view it in the original size.

August 2015 - Mountain Run Lake

Pictures of a couple of visits, who cares:

Smallish snapping turtle:

 Manage to drive a hook point into my finger: bleeds

 Sunfish 1:

 Sunfish 2:

August 26, 2015 - Curtis Lake

Put in at Curtis Lake up in Stafford County, fished until dusk:

Caught one bass on a topwater plug, casting around some standing timber:

Saw several cormorants, which weren't expected since I haven't seen those at Mountain Run Lake for a couple of months:

 And on the way back, my car hit 150,000 miles.  I took a picture of the odometer, although the digital display "turning over" was sort of lackluster.

I'd return to Curtis Lake, ridiculous misspelled racism-tinged porta-john graffiti be damned.

August 22, 2015 - Mountain Run Lake

When I took my first few breaths upon emergence from the womb, I had no idea I'd end up where I am now, furiously typing on a library computer to hammer out a blog post before the time limit cuts me off.  I feel sort of like the character of James Bond in "Goldfinger" as the neutron bomb is about to go off and contaminate the gold supply of Fort Knox and it stops at 3 seconds or something like that.  I wonder if Pierce Brosnan had to be subjected to the consumptive hacking of a guy standing across from him, looking up God-knows-what on the library computer.

Anyway, a major problem with hammering out these blog posts is that really, most fishing trips are unexceptional.  Most of the time, nothing happens that is so noteworthy, so spectacular, that it warrants 300 words to describe it.  It's hard to wax poetic about mediocrity, which is why I feel sorry for newsmen, who, on days where there just isn't enough happening in the world to talk about, like today evidently, resort to inconsequential, rambling articles about idiotic crap nobody cares about, i.e. the current headlining article on the WaPo website:

"Alabama backed off Trump-style immigration law"

Who cares?  Although apparently "Trump-style" is the phrase de jour to be used by all the most fly kids on the block when they could have gotten away with "stupid" and saved themselves some column-inches to cram with more ads for Kohl's 5-day sale and hair-care products.

Anyway, went fishing yesterday, weather was beautiful, only one other boat on the lake.  Put in at around 4-4:30, took out at 7:30.  Fished mostly with a diving crankbait, caught a few small bass, caught a few bluegills on a popper.  Took a picture of a bass:

Saw a muskrat, and what I believe was a great egret, seen here.  It's unfortunate for the author that readers may believe that I thought that this egret was uniquely great, but no, the name of the bird is the "great egret."  Apparently they are also known as the common egret among ornithologists less inclined to prop up the bird's ego.

And found some egret tracks:  

And I don't believe that I ever posted this picture on here.  I've talked about Dead Carp Ditch, aka the Cesspool, but I had been down there after work one day, and lo and behold what do I find floating in the pond but a needle.  Nothing screams family friendly park like AIDS laced needles and twitching junkies (I didn't see any obvious junkies.  If I was more optimistic, maybe I'd figure that the needle was accidentally dropped by a diabetic after enjoying a picnic with his family and friends, maybe celebrating the birth of his first grandchild, but this is Culpeper, where optimism is typically rewarded with another metaphorical steaming pile in the face.)