Fighting for a tradition
Everything tells me not to do this. For the next 4 days I’m going back to all the spots in Lake Huron where I fished for steelhead where I previously saw no fish(see previous post). This is truly crazy, and I know it.
Hey, we’ll have donuts and coffee for breakfast, start fishing before light, stay with it all morning, get out and get some lunch and a nap. Drake will fish hard all morning, and won’t care if there are fish or not. He thinks he will catch a fish the next second all the time. He’s my hero, and I just love fishing with him. We’ll get back in the water in the afternoon, and fish until in gets real calm. Then, right in the picture above, we’ll sit on the shore and drink gin, letting the cold air roll down on us from the wooded hills. We’ll walk out at dark, thankful for another day on the river.
At least this time I won’t be under any false pretenses. After talking with the regional fisheries biologist, I know for a fact Lake Huron is in trouble. Apparently, the “food matrix” has been damaged, and the protein which used to be in billions of baitfish (for the salmon and steelhead to feed on) has “shifted” and become sequesterd inside shell plated zeebra and quagga mussel aliens which coat the bottom of Lake Huron.
Thanks again to our constant lust for cheap imported Walmart products and to the idiot importers who dumped their shipping ballast full of these aliens, as well as others into the Great Lakes. What’s the cost to the consumer for their cheap trinkets and baubels now?
The current state of the Lake Huron’s health is something like this. Imagine taking all the food out of your refrigerator and pantry, and locking it away in a trunk, and that’s all the food you could get. You’d get damn hungry, lose weight, and die unless someone came along and unlocked the trunk.
Good luck to the Michigan DNR in picking the lock. I hope they can fix this one. Anyway, I’ll fish like there are fish in the lake and river, and try not to get discouraged, just keep believing and having fun like the old days. It’ll be a delicate balance between optimism and reality. I’ll just keep thinking I’m going to catch one in the next second. You never know, right Drake?
