Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

    About a week ago, my neighbor and good friend, Butch, mentioned that a friend of his who he has hunted and fished with for years wanted to go fishing for the afternoon at Finger Lake, close to home. He wanted to take his boat out and make sure the motor was running OK. Of course I don't know what we would have done if we'd gotten stuck out in the middle of the lake, since he didn't have a kicker motor, but I'm sure we could have gotten a tow in before it got dark. The day was almost ideal for fishing, overcast with a slight wind. It was kind of cool, but I had brought my jacket, so I was pretty comfortable, unlike my last experience with a boat up here. I need to do a post about that, but I want to get a picture of the boat I rented first so you'll have an appreciation of what an experience that was. Anyway, we motored over to where my friends wanted to fish and I dropped a salmon egg into the water with a bobber about three feet up the line. It didn't take ...

  When I lived in Hoonah, I used to watch the news at night and listen as the announcer spoke of the various cities around Alaska. It wasn't until we moved north to Wasilla and could drive to many of the places that I'd only heard of that we finally visited. This past September Jan and I and our two daughters, Autumn and Liz and their husbands took a trip down to Valdez. The trip down was breathtaking, with the fall colors becoming more evident as we traveled closer to the coast. I was shocked at how much renting a room in a bed and breakfast was. Between the three families we dropped over $1200. 00 for two nights. There was nothing fancy about the place, and the breakfast was a kind of help yourself thing, no fancy pancakes or breakfast rolls. Cereal, juice and boiled eggs and of course coffee. They kind of had us by the short hairs though, so we paid up and kept quiet. Even though it was at the end of the salmon season, Dayville Road, where the public has access to the beach ...

  I mentioned in my last post that I would possibly write about the time I went to the Everglades and was chased by an alligator, and so I will. You might be wondering why I'm posting a picture of a large coho salmon if I'm writing about the Everglades. Well, I don't have any pictures of Largemouth bass nor do I have any of alligators, so I'm substituting this salmon which was bit in half by a salmon shark several years ago. When Jan and I were living in Key West, there wasn't much money to do anything. We were living in the poverty level because the military didn't pay much at the time. It's not like it is now. In any event, one form of free entertainment was to go fishing. There were many nights where we ate supper and then went down to the White Street pier to fish for the little grunts or whatever kind of fish there were there. None of the ones we caught there were very big and it was a bit of a disappointment. Although I had discovered that the canals h...

    Back when I was in grade school, eons ago, we periodically would be given a paper with pictures of things that for the most part had something in common. Among the various things depicted would be one picture that wouldn't seem to quite fit in. We were suppose to circle the thing that didn't seem to follow the pattern of the other things. I'm not really sure how I did on those tests. I could always justify the odd picture being there  somehow. Frankly I don't know if there was even a correct answer to some of those tests. Even as a not so bright kid I felt like something was a little off in administering those tests. I guess I must have passed- they never came to get me for a psychological evaluation or anything and I managed somehow to make it through high school and even into the navy. When I was there they gave us the ink-blot test and asked us what each picture looked like. Is there a right or wrong answer? I don't know....