What to do on bad-weather days

Sometimes cleaning up my workbench allows me to find some neat things.

It seems to happen almost every uear, regardless of the season. There comes a period of a week or so when the fishing or hunting slows down or stops.
Who knows the reason why it happens. That part is not as important as knowing that it will occur. The major question is when it will happen.
Obviously, on any given day, a person or boat filled with people can get skunked or have a very poor showing. That part never bothers me now because fishing is just one more of many reasons to get outdoors and breathe some fresh air.

I’m out there to have fun whether we are successful or not.

If the fish bite or deer move, that’s great. If they don’t, there will be no sad looks on my face. It is what it is, and we usually have no control over it.
However, I look at such days as an opportunity knocking on my door. It’s a day that suddenly is freed up so we can do something different. It allows us to change our plans.
Perhaps, weather permitting, we can arrange a fishing trip on an inland lake or stream. There are countless lakes in the Traverse City area where I can go to fish for bass, bluegills, crappies, northern pike, sunfish, trout or walleyes … just to name a few game fish species.
So what if these fish may not be as big as a lake trout or Great Lakes salmon? It doesn’t make any difference as long as I can find something out there that will pull my string, and make my heart do a flip-flop or two.
Mind you, years ago I would have been devastated by not catching some great huge salmon. The froth would be running from my mouth like saliva from a rabid skunk.
I’d kick the tackle box two or three times just for good measure. The problem was outdoor writers need action and photos to produce magazine stories. No photos, no story, and no money. It’s as simple as that.
No unemployment for me. I could work my butt off, but hard work was no guarantee the weather would cooperate or the fish would bite. Go for a week or two with no money coming in, and it’s enough to make a gent like me a bit testy.

Being retired offers me a certain form of freedom that i take advantage of.

Well, guess what. I’m retired now, and have been for more than six years, and my fishing attitude has changed. There are no hard and fast rules. If I don’t get tonight’s blog done tonight, I’ll do it tomorrow and back-date it.
It’s no big deal. I had two fishing trips called off last week because of rain and wind. It wasn’t the end of my world, and I obviously survived it.
There was other work to be done. I was putzing around with an old Shakespeare bait-casting reel and took it in to get the thing repaired. It needed a new handle, and the repair guy had one. Quick-like, it was done!
There is more stuff around my house that needs my attention, and it’s time I find a home for some of it. I joined the Outdoor Writers Association of America in 1968, and they began sending me monthly newsletters. The paper edition continued until two months ago when OWAA went digital.
So now I have 41 years of monthly newsletters and Kay has received newsletters since she joined in 1978, and since that time we’ve received two copies each month. I’ve still got them but needed some room so two large plastic tubs were purchased and it took both of them to handle the load. Now, both are so heavy I must partially empty them to move them into a storage unit. That was almost a one-day operation, and my back is still sore from tugging the heavy tubs around.
Someone with more time on his hands once came up with the saying: If life deals you lemons, make lemonade. There’s some sort of logic there.
To paraphrase that: If life robs you of a fishing day, find something else to do. Clean a reel, sharpen fish hooks until your eyes cross, put new line on reels that need it changed, and try to clean up things.
I have what some might call a work bench. That gives me too much credit for working or for needing a bench to work at. However, I start looking for something that often is on my work bench, and in the  process of looking, other things get placed on the bench.
Eventually, it would take a small back-hoe to move the stuff off my work bench. So, when the opportunity presents itself with bad fishing or hunting days, I will clean it off and put most of the stuff where it really belongs.

I don’t know where they live but I have a serous problem at certain times of year.

Sadly, I think my home is infested with gremlins with nothing better to do than make a mess of all of my old gear. I put lures back into the proper tackle boxes, strip old line off reels, and prepare them to have line added some other day.
Can’t do all of this at one time. Do that too often, and the meaning of having stuff to clean up and put away will be lost. We must be orderly, and remember what my first-grade teacher tried to pound into the minds of his six-year old students.
“There is a place for everything,” he lectured, “ and everything should be in its place.” Kind of sweeps over you, doesn’t it?
It didn’t make much sense back then, and still doesn’t. Being a pack rat means I enjoy a certain amount of clutter. It gives me something to do on rainy or windy days, things that are far more important that putting up screens or storm windows.

Posted via email from Dave Richey Outdoors