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

Posted via email from Dave Richey Outdoors

Finish up preseason work and lock everything up

One way to save tree stands and ladders is to use climbers.


My ultimate goal is, and always has been, to be ready for bow season by September 1.

That means I have a full month for my hunting areas to settle down before I crawl into a tree stand or ground blind.

My fall food plots are planted, and there is a fairly lush green growth. We needed a rain bad, and last week the plots got a nourishing drink. Even more rain would be good to keep it growing.

What we don’t need is any more 90-degree weather. It’s time some cooloer weather and some more rain.
Deer are moving through the food plots, and after tomorrow, there will be nothing left to do but bide our time. Some long-distance scouting can be done but I don’t plan to spend any time walking through my hunting areas.

We’ve got deer spotted, tree stands are up, our coops are almost all ready, and all I need to do is spend a few hours putting chicken wire around the bottom of the coops to prevent porcupines and other critters from chewing holes in the wood.

Two ground blinds are complete set in place. The fencing around the bottom has be in place, and the coops are locked. Are locks necessary? To my way of thinking, I’m beginning to believe my father was right.

“Locks keep honest people honest,” he used to say. “If you don’t lock things up, and exercise certain precautions, given the opportunity to steal something, some people will take advantage of it.”

I’ve had people take advantage of me when they thought that leaving coops unlocked was fine. So, in the past I’ve had people climb into my coops to hunt when I can’t get away for one reason or another. I’d find the coop doors unlatched and blowing in the breeze, a larger shooting window cut to their liking, and a chair stolen.

Another time I spent two days fixing up tree stamds. I went to one stand, and some fool had stolen the bottom two sections of the ladder stand. The seat and foot rest was still attached to the tree with a good chain and a heavy-duty lock.

Now I stand the sections together, duct tape the chain to the ladder, and lock it. The cost of two good padlocks for the ladder section and another lock and chain for the seat is certainly cheaper than replacing a complete tree stand.

I once had an excellent tree stand, and the deer always came from behind me and on my left side to present a perfect broadside or quartering away shot. The person who would occasionally sneak into my tree stand always left his signature behind.

He was left-handed. He would try to reposition the stand so it was easier for a left-hander to shoot from. The stand was in a cedar tree, and I had fine boughs conveniently placed to break up my outline. Those boughs were tied with twine to suit me.

I went to this tree early one morning, and waded into the cedar swamp and hid. My presence kept the deer from moving that morning, and right about daylight I heard brush cracking as he walked to the tree.

I let him set there, and both of us could hear deer giving the area a wide berth. I snuck up behind the stand, and pulled out the two lower ladder sections. The guy looked down at me, and yelled “What do you think you are doing?”


I said I knew what I was doing. I was making it difficult for him to get down.


He was in my tree, I was on the ground with two ladder sections, and he’s whining about how he’s going to get down. So we had us a little heart-to-heart chat.

“You’ve been hunting my stand illegally for a week or more, and we’re going to settle this now. You either agree to quit sneaking in on my leased property , and stay away from this area, or I’ll call the cops right now. It’s a long ways to the ground, and too far to jump, so either agree to stay away or I’ll press charges.

“You’ll still be up the tree when the police come. Then we will have a chat with the landowner. What’s it going to be?”

He quickly agreed that he wouldn’t come back. OK, I said “Toss me your wallet, with driver’s license and hunting license so I can make a few notes in case I find you’ve been hunting my spot.”

He whined and carried on but I convinced him the two ladder sections wouldn’t be replaced until he complied. I added that while he was at it, he could lower down his bow on my haul rope.

I asked him if he was the one who was hunting out of my blinds. He said he just hunted the tree stand, which was obviously difficult to deny. I took notes, learned he lived nearby, and threatened to walk away.

He gave in, complied with all my wishes, and I asked if he was going to be aggressive when he came down. I didn’t want to fight him, but I wanted him to realize the errors of his ways.
“No, no more hassles,” he said “I’ll leave and won’t be back.”
So that episode ended peacefully, but I’d learned my lesson as well Ladders and tree stands were chained together, and to the tree, and I never lost anything again.

It’s a shame that everything needs to be locked up, but I have a great deal of equity in my food plots, coops and tree stands. All of the work and time is for my satisfaction, and having fools ruining my hunting isn’t something I feel like going through again.

Mr. Nice Guy doesn’t live and hunt here anymore.