And now it's just Stuff

My friend Dave Anderson says that one of his big fears is that if he dies his wife will sell  the fishing tackle for what he told her it all cost. So just this morning I was telling my friend Cody at the gym about the piles of 'stuff' I'm dealing with. Part of professional fishing is being prepared and redundancy is important, if something breaks you need another just like it eh ? So I guess it just happens, you move along and the years go by and you see the stuff accumulate but it's all work stuff, just like a carpenters tools and then : you ain't a carpenter no more and it's stuff, some useless. I was curious so I did something that I'd never done, I counted. This is what 62 reels, 60 rods and 23 landing nets look like,,,,,,,jeez....I love that stuff, but it's gotta go.

Here's something a fisherman will get a kick out of. Below is a close up of the ' DeVito Special' which was the must have lure in the 1970's King salmon fishery . Ol Spence just repackaged the Wardens Spin / Glo product after he put them on a wire spinner twist and added a big ol hootchie skirt and a lethal 7/0 siwash hook. If you didn't have these, you weren't fishing. There were so many fish in that era and it was before the high tech bait cures that we fished these without bait  to great success.  By 78 or so I was using thread to tie Borax cured eggs that were stained red with cherry jello onto the DeVito Special...

And naturally I had to have more than one...So if any of you want to take a trip down memory lane and go retro-fishing just swing by Mile 14 and I'll set you up with the hottest lure from 40 years ago. And oh...these babies sold for 5 bucks a piece back then.

A guy doesn't have to look very hard to know when It's time to move on...ya know, when you finish the book, close the cover. I got one boat that has grass growing in it and the ' fun' boat that Pauly left here has a tree growing through the fluted gunwale. Yikes...

Of course as I work my way around this change in my life I get a little nostalgic. I knew it would end someday I just didn't know it would happen so fast. So this summer will be special, we'll go back to playing the music just for us and fishing just for us...when we want, how we want, it'll be a nice change, the rewards of hard work they tell me.

Having made some serious $ at this and having a ton of fun it's always been my fondest hope that the young guys who come behind us would have the same opportunity to have such a wonderful guiding life. I carried the water, I served on Boards, I testified to Boards and Legislatures. I've donated money and been an outspoken advocate for sport fishing, guided sport fishing. I know the guiding thing is hard for some community people to appreciate, we take up a bit of their space, we have fun doing it, it's hard to look at it for what it is...a clean, renewable committed industry in a small town that could help send Soldotna onto a wonderful future...Wouldn't it be better to support and nurture this existing business model than accepting all the new, the change, just for money...there's just something wrong about these Chamber of Commerce types that think this is all fine...there's simply just something wrong here.

One thing will never change, it's absolutely beautiful here.  Rumor control had it that Beluga Whales are in the river already so MP and I went on photo safari. Didn't find the whales on that day but hey, with views like this who can complain...