Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

  I took my oldest daughter Jennifer out fishing with me a week ago. She enjoys being outside when the weather is sunny, even if it's kind of cold. As you can see from the top picture, it was chilly that morning when we started out. I asked her why she just didn't come inside if she was cold, but she wanted to experience the outdoors first hand, cold or not. She spends all week inside, which is fine when it's rainy or snowy, but when the weather starts to turn she chomps at the bit to get out. It was my second time dropping some lines this year. We had gotten a late start and the wind was blowing a bit,so I opted to just go to Point Sophia and troll around. There wasn't much sign of feed or fish, but we had to try anyway.  I heard from a few people the other day that there were some fish out in Cross Sound, but I'm not going to go out there right now. There's a relatively small area to fish in and I don't feel like being in with a ...

This is a picture of my boat, the Bonnie J. It's not all that much to look at- just an old wooden boat built back in the fourties, just after world war two, I believe. When I went shopping for a bigger boat back in 1990, I knew that I didn't really want a wooden boat,but it's all I could afford. Every year at a minimum you have to scrape and paint it, and if that's all that needed done, I'd feel fortunate. There is always the need to go on the grid iron or haul it out to replace the zincs and re-paint the bottom. The zincs are softer than the other metals in the boat and are considered sacrificial. Because of all the different metals, even in a wood boat, there's an electrical current that surrounds the boat- kind of like a battery. I don't understand all the in's and out's about it, but the current will attack the metal in the boat. If you don't replace the zincs when they need it, the current will eat the prop and keel cooler and eventually the...