The weather, she’s a-changin’

I dream of those old-fashioned childhood winters. Hard freezes that lock the ice to the shoreline on all sides of the lake, and just enough wind to scour the snow away and no worry about pitching through when the ice caves in under my feet.

The memories are still fresh even though my first ice fishing trip was taken about 65 years ago. It was at North Lake near Millington in Tuscola County. Our parents owned a small lot and kept an old house trailer there, and we would visit the area often from January through March.

North Lake held bluegills, largemouth bass, perch, sunfish and some northern pike. Ice-up came quick and hard, freezing the lake's surface, and within a week there was six to 10 inches of firm clear ice.

Not many lakes have very safe ice. Use extreme caution.

The early-ice action always featured a good bite. We had triangulated the green weed beds with three shoreline landmarks, and often could return to the same holes that we'd fished the week before. The 'gills and sunfish would still be there, and we would lowered a six-inch sucker below the ice near the weeds, and caught some nice pike on tip-ups.

That was then and this is now. I don't know whether everyone has been paying attention, but the last three or four years has featured much more wind from the east. Such winds often bring rain, and heavy rains make early ice treacherous and unstable. This winter is the mildest I can ever remember.

One wonders if we are in the middle of the global warming that others have talked about for 15 years. I'm not a scientist, nor a meteorologist, but I am observant. I remember things about the previous years, and I see a pattern forming that I really don't like.

The past several years has produced rather dramatic changes in the Great Lakes and some inland lakes. The Great Lakes undergo a cyclic rise and fall of water levels over the years, and levels have been low for longer than normal. Five years ago many Great Lakes marinas had to dredge so boats could enter and leave their slips during the summer months.

Check out the Betsie River where it flows under the M-22 bridge between Elberta and Frankfort. Chinook salmon and steelhead runs have been poor in this river for a few years, and the reason is low water. There is barely enough water flowing through the channel to allow fish to run upstream.

Several years ago Crystal Lake didn't freeze well and I did a story about three men (two from the same family) that broke through the ice. That they lived was a miracle. The ice stayed bad most of the winter.

We can take a long look at this year. The stage was set for some excellent ice. Cold weather, freezing temperatures and no wind set the stage in early November, and for a week it was making ice on small lakes.

No early winter this year. It was brown at Christmas.

Then, before Nov. 15 and the firearm deer opener, it began to warm up. It now shows little sign of making any ice after today’s all-day reasonably warm temperatures.

Bare ground is a common sight. Our opening-day snow disappeared by mid-day. The deer can roam wherever they wish, and they have easy access to green fields, unpicked cornfields, and open woodlands. There is no need for deer to yard up except in some areas that always get heavy snow, and this could result in an excellent winter for whitetail survival. What is good for the deer is good for wild turkey numbers as well.

It also could bring on an early steelhead run, and put fish in the river long before it freezes across. I've seen it happen, and many fish move upstream to winter over in deep holes. I remember once, years ago when I was guiding anglers, when the steelhead run was over long before the spring thaw began. People who waited until April 1 found few if any fish in the rivers and it could happen again.

The weather is changing. That much should be obvious to all, and it is having an effect on many of those who depend on winter sport for their yearly income. Bait shops will suffer if safe ice doesn't come soon.

The snowmobile industry is facing a big loss of revenue as are northern communities that cater to sled riders and skiers. These high gas prices will cause For Sale signs to be posted on many sleds this  winter. Downhill skiing also faces tough conditions without cold and snow.

A lack of snow cover keeps winter hunters house-bound. They feed their hounds all year in hopes of having good snow, and when it comes late, bunny hunting is pretty poor.

Downhill skiers have man-made snow but that doesn’t work for hunters.

Weather patterns are changing. Will this change continue? Who knows, but if it does, the economy of northern Michigan will suffer once again as it has for the past few years. The stakes are growing ever higher now, and people can hang on only so long before being forced to close their businesses and seek other employment … all too often, out of state.

I try to avoid such doom-and-gloom columns, but the changing weather is a major topic of conversation in every coffee shop in the north. Many people long for the old-fashioned winters, and I am one of them.

Rainy weather makes for miserable driving, and anglers and hunters find little solace in a winter rainstorm.

Posted via email from Dave Richey Outdoors

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