09-04-2019, 12:49 PM
Fishhound volunteered to help me learn about my boat and boating in general. We met up at the Provo Harbor at 7 am. I was all ready to launch and let the learning begin but he gently put the brakes on. He asked me how much I already knew and I told him to assume zero and start from there. That started an hour and a half of basics. I brought a notebook and now have a big list of things I need to get and do. He's a great teacher, including the why along with the what. I have always been not afraid to say, "I don't know--show me." And he did.
It may be a while before I can launch and load by myself. I'll need to add three inches to each leg and regress in age until my knees bend easily, lose 20 pounds of belly fat, lift some weights, etc. Actually, I just have to figure out hand holds and such to be able to scramble over the bow. Practice will help. Meanwhile I still need others to go out with me, so contact me if you would like to go fishing and wouldn't mind spending a few minutes with a greenie.
On to the fishing. We went southwest a few hundred meters and started drifting. Chuck really knows Utah Lake and talked as if he had the names and addresses of all the fish. I'm not sure exactly what setups he used but they were tipped with white bass sections and he caught fish. Evidently he has about as much fishing stuff as TubeDude and vast experience. I ran my usual: one flig and one Santee with bass. For the last three trips I have been catching something right off the bat and it happened again. I boated a cookie cutter at least. Chuck was catching steadily and we had a double or two. One of mine was a bumper at 28.5". The rest were standard fare. I've been keeping track of the lengths of all the channel cats I've caught this year and the average settled on 23.5" early on and stayed there. I want to catch at least 100 before the season is over. The graph is already forming a ragged bell curve; or rather I decided to call it an elephant-head curve with trunk extending out to the right. Try to visualize a standard curve with the bigger fish elongating the line out through just one or two big fish when you get up into the long lengths, the kind we like for the contest. My other purpose in keeping such records was to enable me to have an accurate guess as to how many fish I will have to catch in order to catch the big ones. So far I've caught two 28" fish out of 54. As I intimated before, that's way too small a sample to establish much on, but it at least lets me make a wag. Let's hope I get enough samples to know how many I gotta catch to find a 30"er[
].
I ended up catching three and Chuck brought in several more than that. The Santee out-caught the flig but I probably had too big a piece of bait on the flig. I see where others about wore themselves out catching so many fish. It probably would have helped if we had gotten on the water sooner (no complaint, just observation). They stopped biting around noon but we changed locations a couple of times without any success. Altogether it was a good day and I especially enjoyed meeting Fishhound and getting to know him a bit.
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It may be a while before I can launch and load by myself. I'll need to add three inches to each leg and regress in age until my knees bend easily, lose 20 pounds of belly fat, lift some weights, etc. Actually, I just have to figure out hand holds and such to be able to scramble over the bow. Practice will help. Meanwhile I still need others to go out with me, so contact me if you would like to go fishing and wouldn't mind spending a few minutes with a greenie.
On to the fishing. We went southwest a few hundred meters and started drifting. Chuck really knows Utah Lake and talked as if he had the names and addresses of all the fish. I'm not sure exactly what setups he used but they were tipped with white bass sections and he caught fish. Evidently he has about as much fishing stuff as TubeDude and vast experience. I ran my usual: one flig and one Santee with bass. For the last three trips I have been catching something right off the bat and it happened again. I boated a cookie cutter at least. Chuck was catching steadily and we had a double or two. One of mine was a bumper at 28.5". The rest were standard fare. I've been keeping track of the lengths of all the channel cats I've caught this year and the average settled on 23.5" early on and stayed there. I want to catch at least 100 before the season is over. The graph is already forming a ragged bell curve; or rather I decided to call it an elephant-head curve with trunk extending out to the right. Try to visualize a standard curve with the bigger fish elongating the line out through just one or two big fish when you get up into the long lengths, the kind we like for the contest. My other purpose in keeping such records was to enable me to have an accurate guess as to how many fish I will have to catch in order to catch the big ones. So far I've caught two 28" fish out of 54. As I intimated before, that's way too small a sample to establish much on, but it at least lets me make a wag. Let's hope I get enough samples to know how many I gotta catch to find a 30"er[
].I ended up catching three and Chuck brought in several more than that. The Santee out-caught the flig but I probably had too big a piece of bait on the flig. I see where others about wore themselves out catching so many fish. It probably would have helped if we had gotten on the water sooner (no complaint, just observation). They stopped biting around noon but we changed locations a couple of times without any success. Altogether it was a good day and I especially enjoyed meeting Fishhound and getting to know him a bit.
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The older I get the more I would rather be considered a good man than a good fisherman.