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?

“Crack”, was the sound of the pop top as I opened a beer.  It was the only way I was going to deal with the painful process of removing the Golden Drake boat from the water this year.  Even now, it is 40 degrees and a light wind.  Man, did I want to abandon my plans to take everything out and just go fishing. 

We removed both lifts from the water as Drake swam around in neck deep water.  He just had to be out there with us even though the water temperature was a refreshing 41 degrees.  Yikes.  He ran back to shore, wallowed on the grass and leaves, waded back to us, and so on all afternoon.  It is absolutely a dog’s life, and he’s got a great one.

Fishing had been so good this year for giant bluegills, bass, and northern pike right up until now, and I so hated to throw in the towel.  I tried to console myself with the fact that the boat will be right back in the water in 4 months, and there’s always ice fishing.

I can’t complain, though.  The whole year was great fishing, happy clients, fished with friends, Daughter, and Drake, who got plenty of fish licks in. 

The boat looked great on the trailer hooked up to the company car with the Golden Drake graphics on both.  We got her home, lightly covered her, and had some beer and pizza while Drake slept like a baby in front of the wood burning stove.  More great dog life stuff.

I decided to completely clean, cover, and pickle her later.  You never know, I might want to launch her for the day before it gets…real cold.