Retired!

Oh, boy, you make it sound great. I hope I enjoy mine nearly as much.

About the pike: Do you cut out the Y-shaped bones along the lateral line, or do you cook them with the bones in, and eat around them?

We have northerns in a few lakes but we have pickerel -- redfins and chain pickerel -- all over the place. The redfins are too small to eat but I'll bring home a chain pickerel. I have a tiny Rapala filet knife that I've sharpened like a razor and save just for removing a strip of those bones (and the dark lateral line on bluefish).

BTW, I skin my sunfish. It seems to get rid of any muddy taste. I filet them, too, which is like performing surgery.

Reply to
Ed Huntress
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That's great. I have a feeling that "work" writing will get squeezed out eventually by more important things, like cleaning up the chucks for my SB lathe...

Reply to
Ed Huntress

That's an inspiration, Don. I should keep that list.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

I'll make a few suggestions here, because you can get really deep into the weeds in a hurry when it comes to fly rods and fly fishing.

It's like golf clubs or shotguns: you can spend unbelievable amounts of money on it, but their performance and pleasure you'll get from it have no relationship to how expensive your equipment is. And if you build rods and find out that you don't really like it, it's a waste. Ovis makes fly-fishing outfits that start at $170, and they have some that go up into the thousands. Until you've been at it for a year or two, you wouldn't recognize the difference.

If you want to try it, my suggestion to everyone (except my wife ) is to attend a fly-casting school and see what you think of it. I love it but not everyone does. You have an excellent one in Calif. -- Bill Ward's -- and there are many other smaller, lesser-known ones that would be just as good for a first try. Try their rods and talk to them about what you'd do with it. There are many different kinds and weights, and starting off with the wrong one for the kind of fishing you'd do would be very frustrating.

BTW, there are lots of videos that will help after you get a little hands-on instruction, but they won't help you with the feel and the timing, which are almost everything. Until the last few days I hadn't fly-fished since a year ago this past Spring, and I got really rusty. I'm still not back up to speed. If you only do it from time to time, it probably won't go well. You have to do it fairly frequently. When I can't get trout fishing I'll fly-fish for sunfish or bass. Salt water is another story entirely.

Building rods is fun, but it won't save you any money. My rods probably contain an average of $300 worth of materials each. I could buy really nice rods for that. My newest reel cost a couple of hundred. My $39 one works just as well.

But two of my rods are very special -- you can't buy anything like them, or you couldn't, unless you had them custom-made. That kind of specialization, though, is for someone who has been at it for years.

If you go to a school and find that you really like it, you're probably better off buying a decent but inexpensive rod, rather than building one to start. It takes a few weeks of spare time to do it right at home but the factories can build them in less than an hour. After you've been at it and decide what contour you want, what grip, and what weight, you can buy components a lot more intelligently. I like to make my grips, hosels, and so on from scratch. Without a lathe, you'd want to buy them already made. All you need for equipment is a big book to put some drag on the winding thread, a couple of wire coat hangers, some sandpaper, and a couple of razor blades. But take your time.

Good luck.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Now I better understand your inclination to libertarianism. I've only had to face that kind of thing when I was a medical editor for six years, and half the job was making sure we complied with medical, legal, and regulatory standards. Medical editing pays pretty well because not many people can do it, in that environment. I found it to be insufferably tedious but it was a good-paying job when other editing jobs were on the skids. They always need medical editors.

The regulations in that industry, however, generally make good sense. What doesn't make sense is the huge negative consequences for making a mistake. They grind up editors with regularity, because a mistake can cost the company itself an enormous financial hit. I've witnessed a proofreader getting fired for misspelling a word in a headline. Ironically, it's easier to do that than to make a mistake in text. It's vicious.

Hang in there. We eventually get old and the kids leave the nest. I think I'd be cutting it pretty close if I didn't do any work at all, but I look forward to just writing articles I want to write, when I want to write them. It won't be many.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Thanks, Jon. I hope the rest is like the last week. d8-) I didn't catch many trout (man, am I rusty!) but just being on those freestone streams is worth the effort. It's beautiful up in north-central PA right now. But then, it usually is.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Thanks. I'm between trips and somehow I had to log into RCM.

I'm off again tomorrow evening for some saltwater fishing.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Thanks to both of you guys. So far, so good...

Reply to
Ed Huntress

God, I hope not, but I'm developing some bad habits. I already swear too much and I eat squirrels. What's next?

Reply to
Ed Huntress

What happened with fishing? I might have misunderstood, but I had the idea you were going to be off doing it for a week or so.

Reply to
Rudy Canoza

It might have gotten lost in my enthusiastic post, but it's two trips. Over the weekend, I was fishing for panfish in NJ, just to loosen up my fly-casting arm. Then I went up to north-central PA for some trout fishing. Late yesterday I headed east, to the Pocono Mountains in PA, to a brook trout stream (they're very small creeks, and the fish are small, but they're wild and brookies are native and delicious). I caught a few brookies last evening and then moved downstream a bit, looking for stretches where I could cast a dry fly. I caught the morning hatch today, but I only missed a couple of strikes and caught nothing. As soon as the hatch was over (around 8:30 AM), I headed home and got here just after 10:00.

Tomorrow afternoon I'm headed out again, this time down to Island Beach State Park, which is on a barrier island, to do some surf casting for bluefish. I have to go get my surf reel re-loaded with line first.

I made the mistake of checking into RCM instead of heading right for the tackle shop...

Reply to
Ed Huntress

I figured you hung around here to keep your fingers limber and in shape for serious editing :)

Congrats on the retirement gig.

Word of advice, only admit being retired if someone asks the question. Semiretired is a good alternative regardless if it's true or not.

Reply to
Leon Fisk

Thanks, Leon. Well, in this case it's pretty much true. I'm already thinking about writing something.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

I remove the Y-bones.

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I'm not very good at it yet. Need to catch more northerns.

Me too. I'm getting good at it, can now filet a sunny in well under a minute. Mary and I practiced catch 'n release but there'll be none of that with Vicki. She likes to eat our catches!

A trick with sunnies: I don't bother with trying to follow the ribs to get that last two grams of meat below the ribs. After cutting along the dorsal fin to the spine and then sliding along the spine to the tail, I make the usual transverse cut behind the gills but then make a longitudinal cut just below the lateral line. Filet to that cut, flip the filet and skin it, done with that side! No blood or gut juices are spilled, meat never touches the cleaning table. If you really miss that last two grams of meat, just catch another sunny! We had more than enough for supper last night.

I didn't invent this technique; I learned it from my new friend Ron who catches (and eats) several hundred sunnies per year. He lives on a lake. Few weeks ago he had a fish fry in his back yard for "the group", 42 people. We had plenty of fish. "The group" spun off from a grief support group back in about 2013 or so. We've morphed into a "movin' forward" group of good friends. Vicki and I were founders.

Reply to
Don Foreman

Second that one, Leon. When repeatedly presented with the question, "so what are you doing now that you're retired?" (like I should be doing something noteworthy) and not knowing quite how to respond, I finally settled on saying "whatever I want!" with a big grin. It's truthful, accurate, and most don't really want any more detail anyway.

Reply to
Don Foreman

Congratulation's on retirement, now get to work you slacker.... :-)

I know the feeling about being rusty. Had a damn stroke early in year, still trying to get my hand to release a line correctly.

Signed on the line to vote the other day and they looked it over as it wasn't even close to last years! Told them I was lucky I could still move the hand.

Reply to
Steve W.

Everybody swears at times. Liberals or Conservatives both...

As for the squirrels... Better you than me. I've ate them in the past but the ones around here have WAY to many bugs and diseases to bother with, same with rabbits. Skin'em and feed the 'yotes.

Reply to
Steve W.

I'd invite you up my way to the West Canada but it's running low at the moment. The three local "trout" streams have all but dried up after the way they were destroyed during the floods and clean-up. The one closest to me now runs for a couple of miles over bare bedrock! No pools and only a few rocks to break it up. The rest was shifted and cleaned up to repair it. I figure they might stock it again in a couple years. Who knows how long it will take to have any real population in it.

Reply to
Steve W.

I don't often recommend books, especially to someone in your class...

Your mention of Pennsylvania brought Ned Smith to mind and his book called "Gone for the Day". I only read a little bit at a time because I'll really be bummed when it's done.

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or check out the Ned Smith Center:

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I would make the trip to the Center if it was closer by:

176 Water Company Road Millersburg, PA
Reply to
Leon Fisk

Grok that. Ditto here. Why waste a perfectly good on-hand item?

Reply to
Larry Jaques

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