waxing Poetic

My friend Willy helped me this week. He said something that all fish bums like us know but seldom say and when we do it's never in such a soulful way. After fishing all morning with nothing to show for it and being alone with the sunrise and the gentle slap of the waves he told me " today it was not for the stomach but for the heart " ....wow.... And Willy should know, he recently had a heart condition where they had to do the ablation deal where they restart your heart to correct the rhythm.  So, he has perspective , he has experience, he has a joy for life, a joy for fishing.

Now me on the other hand was thinking about the promise I made to take my name and logo off all my fishing shirts if I didn't catch a fish soon. You know me , I do what I say I'm gonna do so it was with great relief that the rod went off just that very next morning and I landed this gorgeous Robalo. Finally I've learned to let these fish ingest your bait and not to get hinky and set to soon. They are right at your feet in the foamy white water onshore and they just swim onto it and you don't feel the bite as much as you sense something different and the line changes direction. This the second of the year I've landed after hooking 5....I'm learning.

What I'd been doing just wasn't working so well so I remembered a trick I saw on a guys rod in Puerto Vallarta . What I did was tie a 3 or 4 inch loup knot about 3 feet above my swivel right where the mono meets the braid. Then I take a plane old Kenai river Coho fly and loup it on so that it looks like a real small sardine being chased by whatever my throwing lure is, a castmaster works great. The fly catches really no air so it casts just as far and this week I caught 75 % of my fish on it. Brilliant is all I can say....here's proof, a Rooster  and a Toro with it in their mouths.

I had one day where I had two juvenile Roosters, 3 Toro's and a couple of lady fish which are kind of a Mackeral looking fishing that some people call Loco Fish. They jump and flip around and are almost impossible to land with such a soft mouth. On the sunset session that day I had a nice little Monda that I was fixing to release when these kids wanted to handle it....of course I'm all about that but the Monda has a spiney fin system that can make you bleed so I didn't let the kids do it in deference to international relations. But the next fish was a harmless Loco Fish and I got a wonderful pic...that kid ain't afraid of anything, he's going far on this ol trip around the sun.

Even Team X Assistant General Manger to the third Vice President in charge of  morale caught one.

So obviously I have some momentum going. I'm feeling good, my malaise is thing of the past and I'm feeling like I can create magic on demand,,,and another 10,000 casts of course. A beautiful sunset is going on and I gotta throw to make the math work out and walla....a heavy fish hits hard, and I mean hard  right on the beach like a Robalo. But he didn't bite like a Snook or jump like one so I was thinking a nice Pargo. When he finally revealed it wasn't just a nice Snapper but a fairly rare one for us surf guys, a red one....just gorgeous. If you've never caught these fish you have to give it a try, they pull like nothing I'd ever caught before.

I even lent it to a pretty girl for a pic. It's pretty obvious she never attended the Kenai River Guide Academy and learned how to properly pose a good fish.

This is one cool sunset photo and I ain't gonna tell you what it is. You just look at it and give me guess. This scene jumped out at me and I kinda thought about a Kevin Costner movie with one of my all time favorite lines it " Dry land is Not a myth "

And Hey Everybody....Good luck with your boards and bets on Today's Super Bowl. Let's have fun.