When big-water salmon disappear

These two anglers with a big salmon catch. A great fishing day!
photo courtesy Dave Richey Outdoors ©2012

These two anglers with a big salmon catch. A great fishing day!

It seems to happen almost every summer. There comes a period of a week or so when the salmon fishing slows down or seems to stop altogether.

Who knows why it happens. That part is not as important as knowing that it will occur. The major question is when it will happen. Salmon fishing has been hot up and down Lake Michigan.

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.

If the fish bite, that’s great. If they don’t, there will be no sad looks on my face. It is what it is, and we may not have any control over these things. Let’s not whine about it.

Forget about it, already!

However, I look at such days as an opportunity knocking on my door. It’s a day that suddenly is freed up. 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 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 is that outdoor writers need action and photos to produce magazine stories. No photos, no story, and no money. It’s that simple.

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 or deer would move. Go for a week or two with no money coming in, and it’s enough to make a gent like me a bit testy.  I lived this life style for many years before taking a steady paying newspaper job.

Well, guess what; I’m retired now

I have been for more than nine 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.

There was other work to be done. I was putzing around with an old Shakespeare bait-casting reel and took it in to get it  to get 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 attention, and it’s time to 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 years ago when OWAA went digital, and she has 34 years of the bulletin. Multiply both numbers by 12, and it amounts to lots of paper and the loss of more than a few trees.

I’ve still got them but need some room so two large plastic tubs were bought and it took both of them to handle the load. Now, they are so heavy I must partially empty them to move them into a storage unit. That would be almost a one-day operation, and my back is 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 hooks until your eyes cross, put new line on reels that need it changed, and try to clean up things.

I may be insulting it by calling it a work-bench

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 there.

Eventually, it would take a small back-hoe to move stuff off my work-bench. So, when the opportunity presents itself with bad fishing or hunting days, I clean it off and put most of the stuff where it belongs.

Sadly, I think my home is infested with gremlins with nothing better to do than make a mess of all of my old fishing and hunting 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, and this should be things that are far more important that putting up screens or storm windows.

A wise man knows where his priorities lie.

Tags: Dave Richey, Michigan, outdoors, big-water, fishing, clean, gear, location, salmon, fish, success, skunked, Lake Michigan, away

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