12 hour Marathon

Earlier this week, I talked to Jonah about what this weekend would bring us. We decided to go shrimping up at the haulover canal before its park closes for renovations to the dock and ramp. Why? Who knows? It's fine how it is right now. We got out there late, in true fashion, at 11 pm and got to shrimping. Jonah and his friend Peter were up that way the weekend before and had seen a handful of flounder on the banks toward the end of the night and that prompted Jonah to say, "grab the gigs just in case." We tried out a method Jonah was using the week before, which was basically trolling for shrimp... I know...you say, "trolling? but Nathan you can't troll for shrimp, that's not possible." Isn't it? Well, I’m one of the biggest advocates of trying out theories and this one worked. On a night where we would have gone home empty- handed, or close to it, we ended up with 3 freakin gallons of shrimp, one of our best nights to date. After our arms were exhausted from dipping shrimp after shrimp-- even sometimes six shrimp in one dip-- we decided to try to find those wily flounders. I was getting tired at this point, I think it was around 0400, and I couldn't help but the think to myself how much it was going to suck idling along the shore line and looking for an almost invisible target. Much to my surprise, as we trolled down the bank of haulover canal I spotted what looked like two little eyes looking back at me and wham! Gig to the head!!!!! A few minutes later, wham! Jonah strikes another one! Again and again as we drifted with the contours of the coast we pounded them into the cooler. Success never tasted as good as shrimp stuffed flounder! We ended the night at 0500 with five good size flounder and three gallons of shrimp and headed back to the house. Now, this is when people normally hang up their hats and crawl into a warm bed and sleep till noon the next day then apologize to their loved ones for staying out so late with his/her friends..... but no, not Nathan. In my red bull- induced frenzy, I decide to go home and grab my boat to go pig hunting early a.m. and spec fishing in the later a.m. on the mighty St. Johns. I think my exact works where "Yeah, I think I can make it out there before the sun comes up." Boy was that a bad idea...Once I loaded the boat, grabbed my gear (those of you who know me well know that me getting the boat ready takes forever) and headed to Doc's for some minnows and ice. $16 bucks later (I’m going to review local bait shops one day and Doc's is a work in progress) I get out of there with four dozen minnows, a bag of ice and some red worms. I get to the dock and it takes me about an hour to get the boat started. After exhausting my resources trying to get the stupid thing started, I make a last ditch effort and trim the motor down, thinking "maybe this will work?" vrrroooommmmm! Starts right up! WTF?! So, back to the marathon, I get running across the lake finally at 0830 and get to a spot where I’ve known there to be some pigs. I think you can guess that I didn't see any. I had a nice walk and was able to watch a couple of raccoon babies wrestling but other than that I didn't see or hear anything. So on to spec fishing I go. After I trekked back to the boat, two guys had conveniently positioned themselves a few yards from my empty boat that had all my fishing gear in it. I made sure I spent an extra amount of time unloading my gun right in front of them... I sat and rigged up my fishing rods for a while, in anticipation of a real action- packed late morning. I fished the mouth of Middle River and wasn’t catching anything so I pulled up and moved about a half a mile upstream and started catching some sunfish and small catfish. I ended the day only keeping one big sunfish (because it swallowed the hook). All in all, it was quite the 12 hr stretch and I was beat!

Last ditch effort....

Last ditch effort.... I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…. this is the time of year that the average outdoorsman starts to get a little feverish: you start to see them loitering around fueling stations and acting funning in crowds bigger than the amount of people that would normally fit on their boat. Yes, that fever and irregular behavior means it’s spring time. The weather’s warming, the water temps are rising, the boats are dusty and begging for use. However, it’s also the time of year you can wake up with a 5 mph west wind on a calm cool morning and think, “let’s go fishing,” go ahead and get the boat ready, and once you’re headed over the causeway ready for an epic day on the water, you notice a little bump on the water but think nothing of it. No big deal, right? Well, an hour later when you’re 21 miles offshore getting pummeled by 30 mph north wind and a “small craft advisory” has been posted that was conveniently overlooked or mispredicted by our good friends at NOAA and you tend to curse the weather guy. One way to get through the blues of a windy day is get out to the mighty St. Johns where you can essentially “hide” from the windy conditions and get some long awaited fishing in-- at least, that’s what I did this weekend. Not really planning on doing much due to high winds and not so favorable conditions, I figured the weekend was a bust. Sunday I was becoming combative on the couch watching the outdoor channel and I finally just said F--- it and got off my butt and made something happen for myself. I grabbed the phone and called the only person I could think of that would be awake and willing to do something adventurous: I called the great northerner…Preston. I knew with the right type of invite I could make it appealing enough for him to skip church and go with me. I said, “Yo, Preston, skip church…come enjoy the fruits of the Lord’s creation and worship at the Church of the St. Johns with me.” And that’s all it took. We were off to the bait shop. The Friday before was the peek on the full moon so we weren’t in any kind of hurry. I think we ended getting to an acceptable spot around 1300 and got to it. With a targeted species of crappie, we had high hopes of all our minnows ending up in the bellies of a bucket full of specs. Well, that’s not quite what we caught but we did put a hurt on a cooler of butter cats and bud lights. I think the final tally was somewhere between 25-30 butters along with 3 or 4 straggler specs. The one spec that Preston brought in, with the LAST MINNOW by the way, hit the 1.5 lb range which was satisfying. It was nice having two meals for four of freshwater catfish.

Bobcats, White Owls and Airboats

Based on the title, my Jeopardy answer: "what are two things I'm not willing to shoot at." Doug, Jonah and I braved the savage Lake Poinsett and fought the northerly flow Saturday morning looking to bag a few pigs during this month’s small game season. It was forecasted to be unfavorable weather that afternoon so we got an early start. As chilly as it seemed to be, when I walked out of the door around 0430 I thought it would be a miserable day in the swamp. The day ended up being beautiful, as you can see from the video: 15 mph southwest wind, air temp in the 50's. They dropped me off at the shelter where Dorian Airboat Canal dumps into the Middle River which is about 2 miles from where they hunted southwest of me. On my side of the swamp things were pretty status quo, just the usual sound of pigs beating up on each other before they bed down for the day. I made an attempt to get to them but they were just too far into the thicket for me to catch up with them. Doug and Jonah were lucky enough to watch a bobcat walk in front of them but unfortunately that's the majority of what they had for action that morning. Later in the morning we met over by one of the public camping sites called Pontoon Camp and we decided to walk through a few hammocks to try our hand at squirrel harvesting. As we drudged through the second or third dense patch of palmettos, something odd caught our eyes. It was a white owl flying away through the trees. It was pretty neat to see. We heard a crash in the top of one of the cabbage palms close to us and something resembling a half-eaten rat plopped on the ground next to Jonah. Anyways, that’s it from this last weekend. I'd like to get out and try to spend the day out on Middle River next weekend, spending the early hours chasing the recently elusive black spots and then changing gears and fishing for specs in the later part of the morning. John D., aka the great white hunter, say they're really stacking up on the hard turns of the river right now. He was out on Tuesday and picked up his limit. Maybe I'll take the fly rod? Whatever the weekend might bring, I'll try to keep everyone informed.

"Let's get to work"

Well, I'm not too sure where to start with this whole BLOG thing, so I’ll give you a quick background. I was informed by “someone” that they were bummed out that I hadn’t been copying them on the latest outdoor reports (adventures of the great clueless sailors) I send out via email every so often. So, like the nice guy that I am, (shut up - I can hear you laughing in your head!) I figured I’d throw this out there and give everyone an equal opportunity ( oh great, Blythe’s democrat germs are getting all over me…eewww) to try to keep up with my reports. I’m going to make an earnest effort to keep up with this and keep as much BS out of it... so what you read is as close to an accurate report as it gets. I’m not sure how to disseminate the fact that I have made a new post but I might ask Blythe to put something on her “face plant” page about it. This is ultimately an effort to build a reputation as a successful outdoorsman in case I ever want to try to charge you scallywags. I’m not the best writer but I try, so don’t critique me too much; I’ll do my best.

An Update since November or so 2010-

Game- 4 gators 1 buck 12 ducks 1 pig 28 squirrels Fish- 2.5 million sea bass 1 trigger

2 black drum 12 whiting

1 gallon of shrimp

Babies-

1 girl

mmmmm? can't think of any else right now...