Coming soon: A book of stories from an angling life
Please feel free share this post with your friends and personal netwrks It’s been said that the best time to go fishing is when you can. If you’re like me, you’ve fished for more years than you’ve done almost anything else except breathing, sleeping and eating. I was on a fishing outing with my father…
Ten Things to Know About Your Lake in Winter
Your lake is a very different place when encased in ice for the winter, but it’s still very much a living system with many mysteries to explore. Here are ten things you may not know about the life of a frozen lake. It all starts with steam. Look out on your lake on a very…
Recordings in snow
Please feel free to share this post with your friends and networks and to subscribe to this blog. On Saturday morning Birch Lake lay covered in virginal white, not a mark on the fresh snow except a few hoofmarks of deer and a straight-line string tracks of what might have been a fox. That soon changed.…
Never the Same
Please feel free share this post with your friends and networks — and to subscribe to my blog! December 8 Every year I watch the ice form here on Birch Lake, and every year it happens differently. Sometimes the ice gradually creeps out from the shoreline, and an entire sheet takes shape over several days.…
Zebras and mercury
Please feel free to share this post with your networks and to subscribe to my blog. Lake residents and lake lovers fear zebra mussels perhaps more than any other aquatic invasive species. They encrust pier supports and boat hulls. They cover almost any hard object in the water. Their broken shells can cut waders’ feet.…
October Goodbye
If I took a picture of Birch Lake’s wooded shoreline with my phone and went to work on it with the fancy editing functions, I couldn’t do much to dial up the color, nor would I want to – there’s such a thing as too much. Anyway that’s the scene as I pilot the pontoon…
Bernie and me
Please feel free to share this post Aging is an insidious thing, for people as well as pets. I remember clearly the moment I discovered I had, as they say in sports, lost a step. I was in my late thirties. At a company softball game, the team captain assigned me to right field. I…
Home Water
I’m just back from five days at a lodge on a huge lake in Ontario. My companions and I enjoyed good fishing, but to find walleyes we had to feel our way around, using a map, advice from the lodge owner, our knowledge of fish behavior (such as it is), and information from the boat-mounted…
Inside the glow
Inside the glow It’s a Tuesday evening about eight o’clock, the July 4 weekend just over, the visitors to Birch Lake gone home. I’m out in the boat watching a couple of slip bobbers as the sun slowly dips through the horizon’s haze toward the treetops. Mine is the only boat on the lake. There…