Day trips
(Aside- in my attempt to romatify the boat previously naming it autumn, steamin called it the wooden shoe after some comment related to how ill probably serve cheesy casseroles in it being a western Michigan dutchie, and likeall good namesdo, it stuck, so the wooden shoe it is.)
The word “Day trip” almost doesn’t do these days justice, as they typically encompass about 18 hours of the chosen day. These days start around 4:00 to 4:15 after a night of restless sleep, and look kind of like this to start things off.
Bear and I planned on fishing some low density trout water on the duck opener with a shotgun in the boat just Incase we flushed any.
Around the coffee table the idea of catching a big trout and shooting a mixed bag of mallard and woodies sounds perfectly doable. Then when you’re on the water you’re either focused on the fishing, and realize the time it takes for you to set your rod down, pick up the gun, remove the safety, take aim, and fire is much longer that you had ever thought. And in the mean time your sink tip has now taken residence in a log jam. Or, you float down a perfectly stained, swollen river with a gun at ready only to see no ducks, then realize In hindsight you just bypassed several miles of swollen river on an overcast day you’d kill to have any other outing.
So, our plan was to keep the gun in the boat while we fished, then finally ready it while we were pushing out at the end.
But first, coffee.
This particular day it rained, spat, and rained some more. Which is just fine because rain, low skies, and a rising river make trout happy.
What's even more important than a good rod in the front and a rower who always keeps adequate distance for a full retreave, and proper pace is Attitude. In water like this you can go many trips without encountering an animal. As soon as you start to doubt your chances it's over. If it's sunny, hot, cold, low water, high water you need to fish with the same confidence and positive additude or else you might as well just be floating down the river with the rest of the drunk canoeists in July.
With no trout seen, we nestled the shoe up to the bank.
And made our shore lunch in a dark cedar swamp thick enough to keep us dry. Shore lunch would be slow-cooker jambalaya.
And Busch light
We fished until both of our stripping fingers were bleeding, and caught nothing. The nice thing, is we’ve grown to kind of expect it when in water like this so we were in great spirits all day and chalked it up to good juju for a good day someday this fall.
On the way out we shot a woodie, and schemed our next trip to hunt for a big trout.
- By CC Riebeeck
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