A secret to happiness

As you all know, I like to talk. So this job of mine is perfect as we have hours and hours to deepen our horizons and getting an understanding of our places on this trip around the sun. Through the years I've learned a lot from the folks I fish with, financial advice all the way up to medical insight and of course ....fishing info. But the other day a guy said something that really resonated with me" one of the keys to happiness is to expect more from yourself and less of others "....mmmmm.....I guess I've always known that you can't control others, only yourself, and I guess I knew that you feel better on the right road. It's something I've dealt with over and over, I set high standards and goals for myself and then have an unfair way of applying those standards and goals to others which makes me continually disappointed in some people. So.....expect more of yourself.... So for me it's like this, when I get around hurtful people, expecting more is the forgiveness that I've never been good at, gonna give that a try in Mazatlan this year.

Yeh, yeh, yeh....get to the dead fish stuff, right ? Well I'd say that the old Kenai is experiencing about as slow of Silver fishing that we've seen in 10 years and actually it's not all that bad. Some things in life are good even when they're bad. Even our Humpy's that are mosquito thick every other year are kinda slow. So it does my heart good to know that even with lower salmon numbers if you work hard you can still hit over 500, which we did all week. Last week I asked whats better than a 12 year old with a salmon....mmmmm, a 13 year old comes pretty close. And a 14 year old is pretty darn chuckly to.

Man does that flash at O dark thirty make for a cool pic or what ? Thanks Connor and Cam for coming along, you're the future of this whole deal so welcome to the plate. I do sometimes worry about the future of sportfishing when we live in an area where gill net's are accepted as fair pursuit, which they ain't. The net captures the fish only after he's been tricked into biting the bait and then given a fair chance to break the line, spit the hook, run through the prop, backlash the reel....100 things can go wrong. But when I see kids fishing like this when me and MP were on our walk I feel good, many smiles.....way to go guys. Life jackets, eye protection, early morning, ya got good parents kids.

Seems like lately I've had some expert fish poser's. I don't think these guys even tried to achieve perfect fish geometry but they sure did. Sam, Jody, Cam being anchored by my old friend Howard Brown. Great day guys, mucho gracias.

Just when I thought that the perfect pose was in every fisherman's DNA I caught my new friend Tom getting it done, ahhhh.....he's coaching Rich there pretty good. Now Tom is a fishing guide on the Sabine River is East Texas and he knows the way. So when you get a seasoned poser/cameraman/promoter you pay attention, right Rich ? Tom there doing the tutorial is the only guy who's ever showed up with as much fish guts and blood on his clothes as me.

The guy on the left there is Joe Ray De La Cruz...and he needs to see a fish whisperer. He never had a bite and as you can see everyone else got the limit. Here's Tom and Jane who both guide like I do and Rich....and the fish that Jane got us started with in the morning.

The other day my old friend Randy Berg trolled by. He's a steady guy and we've been friends for 35 years , I guess we kinda kicked this whole deal off. They had just seen us come off the anchor to land a silver and as they trolled by the guy in the front of the boat said " hey I got this lure here that catches nothing but humpy's "....So I asked him how much he wanted for it...