Fished a Day, Again, Report

Fished a Day, Again, Report

Regular readers of this blog know I have been working on building a canoe. But now that the frame is done, there’s not much for me to do on it until the skin gets here next week.

Regular readers of this blog also know I have a Sienna van, adapted to camping. The van has almost 120,000 miles on it. I wanted new shocks. The only way to access the shock top is through panels on the van’s interior. So all that camping build needed to be removed, which took most of the day on Monday. It looks like a cave inside the vehicle now.

Minor construction around the house took most of Tuesday. There’s more to come.

FISHING DAY Wednesday I dropped my kayak into the Indian River Lagoon’s brown water which was loaded with Rhodophyta and a filamentous green alga. Yuk.

I did not see a dolphin or a manatee. I did see what was for me a new organism. There were small mussels, quite a lot of them, growing on the stems and roots of the black mangroves. Some research followed. There are a couple native mussel species in the lagoon. There are also a couple invasive species. I have no mussel expertise, but I did contact Dr. Walters at UCF, who does. I will keep you informed.

I did see a few fish. Fishing was tough- it was windier than I expected it to be. I hardly touched the fly rod. When it’s windy it’s nearly impossible to control the boat and fly fish at the same time. I got six bites using spin tackle, and caught them all- two trout, two reds, and two snook. Got a bad picture of the best red, which I sight-fished.

It was swimming down the bank. I cast ahead of it while the kayak drifted, not moving the lure until I thought the fish would see it. When I twitched the bait, he crushed it. It was quite gratifying, best fish of the day.

Thursday, fun with cars. Put those new shocks in. It’s something I do infrequently, so a 30- or 40-minute job takes all morning. But they’re in. After I get the camper build back in there, I need to do the struts on the front end…

And there’s always the house construction, and the exotic ferns to keep me off the water. The joys of home ownership. It seems to come in waves, that sort of thing.

And that’s the Fished a Day again report. Thanks for reading!

Every day is a blessing. Don’t waste it- Go fishing! Go paddling! Take a walk! Stay active!

John Kumiski
www.johnkumiski.com
www.spottedtail.com
www.spottedtail.com/blog

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