You Don’t Want to Know What I Call the Wind!

Seriously, you can only clean a reel, change the line, grease the hubs on the trailer wheels, check every hose on the outboard, change the lower unit grease, check the trailer torsion bars so many times before it's just overkill. I didn't realize that I had so many reels to be honest. And I probably didn't need to clean the old Daiwa PM and PR series reels; they're antiquated to say the least but man it won't stop blowing and I get bored easily. Anything fishing related seems to help right now.

For me, this time of year is my busiest work-wise so I don't get on the water as much as I'd like but there's no way with the wind blowing like it is that I would have pulled the boat anywhere to begin with. Oh I'm sure people have been catching fish but I don't think I'm that mad at them anymore; not to fight the kind of wind we've been having in my area. Farther south I'd go but even though it's fishable in this kind of wind it's not what I prefer and with the price of fuel; I can wait a while longer.

But not being able to go fishing gave me a chance to look over a lot of my tackle and to be honest I wasn't happy with a lot of what I saw. Rusted split rings, rusty hooks and some that needed sharpening, cracked topwater baits that leak and hold water (tested them all in my wife's sink until she ran me out of the kitchen). I threw away at least a dozen expensive baits due to cracks; some were so bad that the ball bearing inside that makes the nice rattle sound was rusted and wouldn't move. I'm embarrassed to say how many jig heads I had to throw away that were rusted because I didn't clean them properly after my last wade fishing trip when saltwater got into my lure box.

I replaced drag washers and bearings on a number of reels and found a cracked eye on one of my rods. Mr. Moller, a local rod builder, fixed that problem for me and KUDOS to him because when he finished you can't tell that any work was done to that rodhe does great work and is fast and very reasonable.

I fixed a leak in my breathable waders that has bugged me since early fall. I should have fixed it earlier but since I was using them regularly and the leak only caused my right leg to get slightly wet below the knee I didn't' mess with it. Blah, I should have patched them right away but I figured I'd just wait for a rainy day. The rain never came so I settled on a windy day; one of many.

During the windy days of April and early May I took care of some projects that had been languishing for some time and that made my wife happy. One of the projects, a new reloading bench, made me happy. I organized my fishing gear, found some that I thought I had lost forever, (not really, truth be told I'd forgotten that I had it) and I put about a thousand image files into properly named folders on my laptop. I cataloged my articles by month and year and was doing great until I started looking at the fishing tackle online but I did get most of the computer work done, well a lot of it anyway.

I practiced tying new knots. I especially like the one for tying braid to fluorocarbon and I shouldn't have to practice it much longer before I remember how to do it without looking at the handy little animation I found on the Internet. The knot is the Albright Special and it really holds well and glides through the eyes of my rods smoothly. If you'd like to have a look at the animation, you can see it here. http://www.netknots.com/html/albright_special.html

But while all of the maintenance is a good thing and taking care of projects is a responsibility, I keep watching the trees bend to the strong southeast winds and wonder when it's going to stop blowing and when it's going to rain. And I'm quite certain that once the winds lay down and the rains come I'll start whining about the rain and wonder when that will stop.

Be Safe,
Martin