Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

  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...

 If you've lived long enough you might remember an old TV western called Have Gun, Will Travel. It starred Richard Boone as a hired gun or bounty hunter. It's been so long ago since it's been on, that I can't really remember much about it, which doesn't really matter, because this post isn't about a western, it's about hoochies, one of my favorite subjects. The young lady pictured here is a Forest Service employee named Erin, who I am going to assume has been put in a position of authority for this year's Annual Kid's Fishing Derby. This year will mark thirty years. That's pretty incredible. Every year there is a saying that is printed on T-shirts that are passed out to the participants. I'm not sure what the saying and logo will be this year, but last year's slogan was Keep Calm and Fish On. I can actually relate to that. I've found myself on more occasions than I care to mention coming totally unglued, either because it see...

   When most folks think about Alaska, sharks never even come to mind. I'd never heard that there were sharks here until I started commercial fishing some years back. One year I leased the troller Acadia from one of my friend from the farm. It was June and I went up in Port Fredrick to a place just known as the waterfalls, oddly enough because there is a waterfall right there. Anyway, one of the local highliners, Joar Savland, was fishing his boat, the Standy up there. I was still learning the fishing business at the time, so I thought it would be wise to follow behind him a few boat lengths and spy on him with the binoculars, you know, see what he was using, how fast he was trolling and so on. Well, I got distracted somehow, maybe I even had a bite, I don't remember, but anyhow I lost track of him for a bit. When I located him again I noticed a fin circling a ways behind his boat. I thought he had knocked a big King Salmon off his line and it was stunned. I figured that i...