Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Gimmie one more chance! That's what I was wailing when Kathy Stecker dropped the pheasant I had missed moments earlier. I hunted with Kathy and her sister, Mary Williams, again on Sunday afternoon. I needed a couple more photos of them with birds, so we headed for one of the fields the Ozaukee Fish & Game Association leases from local farmers. The club stocks birds each weekend, and Mary is a shooting member. She is, in fact, the only female shooting member at present, but that's another story for another time. Kathy and I were her guests for the afternoon. We were working our way south through a sea of prairie grass, when Mary's pointer, Rosie, flushed a bird behind me. I swung around and snapped off two quick shots as it flew directly toward the sun. (I need a good excuse for missing in the company of competent shooters.) We marked the bird down at the edge of a distant evergreen grove and continued on. Both dogs got birdy where the pheasant had come down, but they took off in opposite directions. Maybe there were a couple birds there. Tasha, Kathy's lab, straightened out the track and flushed it in the spruce thicket, where Kathy dropped it. When she brought it out to show us and put a club tag on it, I was surprised to see it was a hen. "That's what you shot at," Kathy said. "It looked big, but maybe it was closer than I thought," I said. "I'd have sworn it was a rooster." "No, you shot at a hen," Mary concurred. They each had a better angle, and I had the sun. Both sexes are legal on club grounds, but still, a guy should know what he is shooting at. After a swing along a wooded hillside and adjacent swamp, we turned back north and Rosie went on point in a nasty tangle of prickly ash. Seconds later, three hens flushed and flew north into more prickly ash, dogwood and hawthorn. Lovely stuff. We made one more pass, then retreated to the vehicles around 3:00. The ladies went on to hunt another field, but I headed for home. Shivani was probably back from her craft fair by then, and the Packers were playing Minnesota. Besides, it's not a good idea to spend all of your wife's birthday out with two other ladies, even if you are hunting pheasants. Later... 9:44:37 PM    comment []

Doing the Orihula Hula Spent today on the Wolf River with my friend, Joel "Doc" Kunz and my TV crew, Thad Groszczyk and Michael Garvin. We were after walleyes and managed to catch a few. Nothing big, but four good "eaters" and a dozen or so "cigars." One thing that always amazes me is the camaraderie that prevails on the Wolf. There were 8 or 10 boats working the same holes we were fishing, from Orihula down to the mouth at Lake Poygan. Everybody caught fish, though no one had a limit or they would have left. On some waters, anglers fishing close enough to spit into each others' boats would feel crowded and start cursing or fighting or shooting at each other, but not here. A lot of them know each other, which helps, but it's a lot like the ice fishermen on Lake Winnebago. With 130,000 acres to fish, they still get close enough to talk to each other when the perch bite is on. A couple guys recognized Doc and razzed him for not catching many fish. Doc did tell me about one guy who chewed him out recently for writing about the great walleye bite up at New London and then fishing 23 miles downriver at Boom Island. Such encounters are rare, however. We stopped at the Slip Knot for lunch, and Kimberly, the shimmying barkeep kept us in stitches. I asked her for some ice to fill my cooler "for my friends." She went into the kitchen and came out with a 5-gallon bucket of cubes, dumped it into my cooler and asked "What are those?" I looked at her like she had come from another planet. "That's the Wolf River out there. These are walleyes," I said. "Oh. Do they get any bigger?" she wanted to know. "These won't," I replied. "Where are you from?" "Hawaii," she said. There's got to be a long story there, but we didn't get very far on her history. The last thing you'd expect to find in a dive in downtown Fremont, Wisconsin, on a Tuesday afternoon in November is a lanky gal with curly, showgirl tresses in a flimsy summer dress with one of those elastic tops you can pull down over a shoulder, but there she was. When we walked in, she was entertaining a small gathering near the door, one shoulder bared. She sashayed down to our end of the bar and started cheering Thad as he stripped off his rainsuit. "Take it all off," she said. Thad chuckled, as only Thad can chuckle. Doc and I looked at each other, then at Kimberly, then at the menu. Next time I noticed, she had both shoulders bared. She was working us pretty good, and we were warming up to it. An 8-mile boat ride at 50 miles an hour on a 45-degree day can chill a guy. We ordered drinks. Pepsi, iced tea, hot cocoa. Tough drinks for tough dudes on a tough day. When Michael came out of the men's room, she asked, "Mister, what'll you have?" He smiled and ordered a Coke. "Pepsi OK?" she smiled back. "No, make it a Brisk," he said, eyeing my Lipton can. We ordered lunch, then Kimberly went on to tell us how she doesn't like the water here because you can't see very far and boats can come up on you fast, unlike Hawaii, where you can see for miles. But where there are sharks, I was thinking... "I went up to Eagle River last summer with some friends," she said. "It was hot and I was really ready to go into the water there. We got out of the van, opened a beer and I was down on the dock, ready to jump right in. There was a high-voltage power line across the river right there, and down the river came this big crane or heron. It touched a line with each wing and 'Zap!' just folded up and dropped into the river, and there was a big splash and something ate it just like that! It disappeared without even any bubbles! There was no way I was going in after I saw that! What do you call those big fish? Northerns? No..." "Muskies," we told her. Doc was laughing so hard he burbled in his Pepsi. I'd love to believe there are muskies in the Eagle River big enough to swallow a great blue heron, but that's a fish tale even my friend George Langley would have a tough time telling with a straight face. I wonder if anybody makes a surface bait with 3-foot wings and legs?   Nah, it'd be a bitch to cast anyway. Later... 9:22:06 PM    comment []

Opening Day in Yooperland I have been posting John Walker's Fish Reports on my "Stories" page, but thought you might enjoy this one without having to go look for it, so here it is on my front page. Besides, that gives me a little more time to write a post of my own. I see it's been awhile since I uupdated, but then I've been busy out there. Remember, John's books are all available on Dan's Mall. Just click on Dan's website and you'll find a link there, or you can just click here. Later... Fish Report: 11/16/04 Well, you have to admit that the opening of deer season sure was not deer season weather like we are supposed to have. Then by the second day it was almost too warm to walk around in the woods. It sure made for an interesting few days. Of course if all the shots I heard on opening day bagged a deer there are not any left out there for the rest of us to get. But if you average it out the second day was almost shotless. Now what we really need is just enough snow for good tracking so you can figure out what the deer are up to. Then it can just be cold enough to keep this snow and we all will be happy. There were a few deer taken the first couple of days, but there are also a lot of hunters out there still waiting for a nice one to walk by. There seemed to be a lot of hunters checking out all the 2-tracks looking for the perfect place to hunt. I don't know if hunters numbers are up or a lot of road warriors are just poking around the area where I was. It never fails that I hear about some crews that just come up to party and they don't care whose hunting season they goof up just so they can raise cain. I have to wonder if some of these ever get out in the woods. What scares me even more is the fact that they get into the statistics involving hunters. I have said this before in the Fish Report but I think it bears repeating. For 90% of the year you can drive the roads through the state and national forest and very seldom see beer cans littered along the roads. But! Let the "hunters" or should I say "party" crew come up and you see cans littered all along the roads. Are not these supposed to be the people that love and respect the great outdoors? If so why come up here and mess it up? Thank goodness the people that do the littering are a real small percentage of all the people that are out in the woods. The other thing I come across in my travels is where there are still people making 4-wheeler roads anywhere they would like to go on federal land. By this I don't mean on old logging roads or even skid trails, but their own road down into creek bottoms and anywhere else they feel like traveling. These too are the type people that ruin it for those of us that would like to use a 4-wheeler on 2-tracks or logging roads. How come these people never seem to get caught, but someone on a 2-track gets a ticket. Maybe it is because you have to get off the road and walk to find these people. I picked up a pamphlet from the National Forest Service and found out that ORV's have been up graded from Off Road Vehicles to OHV's Off Highway Vehicles. I have to wonder at times where some of this stuff comes from. They have always been ORV's since the first 3-wheelers, 4-wheelers, and off road bikes came out, so why for the Feds are they now OHV's? If you read this pamphlet you will soon realize that 90% of the places where ORV's, now OHV's are ridden are on roads where it is illegal to ride them. So a word of warning is to be careful where you operate off your own property because Big Brother is watching for you. Getting back to deer season, it seems like hunters are seeing a good number of deer but not the one with antlers they are looking for. But remember the best part of deer season is camp life. You see a lot of spoiled hunters in a hunting camp. All the stuff that is way to expensive to buy at any other time of year is always on your camp grocery list. This plus all the snacks and sweets that you have to watch out for 50 weeks out of the year you do not have to watched out for at deer camp or in a deer blind. This is just a fact of life up here in Yooperland. In fact if you cook hotdogs over an open fire you have to have the type that are in natural casings that pop as you cook them. You know a true hunter has even been known to eat "butterflies" out at deer camp. You take these "butterflies" and put in a few onions, then cook them slow over a camp fire and life cannot get any better. So get out there and enjoy the great outdoors while you are still able to get around before life catches up to you. "Tales From A Game Warden" John A. Walker 530 Alger Ave Manistique, MI 49854 906-341-2082 8:40:58 PM    comment []