Thread: Noah week

It has been more than a full week of rain here, and won't let up for another few days. The ground is so soggy even the hillsides are mud beneath the emerald new grass. The streams are roaring and coffee milk colored. I read fishing stories, but they get boring after awhile. The high temperature for each day is 50 degrees. The lows at night are 43 degrees. Or 42. Or 40. Cookie cutter days and nights

Between showers each day, I go down to my local pond and fish from shore. Fifteen minutes, or twenty. My boat stays on top of the car rack. I pick up 2, or 3 or 5 crappies between 9 and 11 inches until they stop biting. I release all of them, grateful to do something other than read fishing stories.

Today, I decided to stay longer. I didn't want to go home and read fishing stories. Hemingway talking about black marlin, and how sluggish they are. Cuba 90 years ago. Life on another planet, it seems like.

I stayed without a raincoat two hours, rain off and on. Catching crappies every once in awhile. The little green bobber, sometimes disappearing and a flash underneath as I struck. Trying differnent depths. Three feet was the key.

They didn't like eighteen inches or twenty four. Not today. They didn't like orange and yellow, they didn't like monkey milk, whatever that is. They didn't like pink and yellow. The kinda liked clear and silver specks.

But what they really said yes to was silver sparkly blue. When I switched away from it, the bobber just floated free. When I switched back, it went under. A woman pulled up in a new gray car. And took a little child out, wearing a little rain suit, and a little rain cap, and brought her child to the water. The child stood with shoes in the mud, looking across the way to a blue heron. The rain was falling lightly.

"Introduction to water?" I asked.

"If we're going to get wet," she said we might as well get wet," and laughed.

I thought she was brave, and the child, too would grow up to be brave. I wanted to catch another crappie, so they could see a fish. But I had the pink and green jig on, so no crappie pulled the bobber down. The rain picked up, mother and child left, and I switched back to silvery blue, and caught another.

Same here with the woodstove all week in evenings at home. Definitely no beds or fish yet showing at the usual sunfish bedding locations. Water temps here topped at 58F midday in the shallows back on the sunniest day a week ago, and have gone down since.