Late Spring Musings, 2013

I've been catching fish lately, but nothing really blog-worthy.  (Dave, NONE of your previous report were blog-worthy either!).  Touche.  Well, stop reading right now, then....because this post will likely only be interesting to me.  Consider yourself warned.  :)

As I've written numerous times, I keep an electronic Fishing Log each year.  Each year I have a personal goal of catching 1,000 fish.  Since I started flyfishing, that goal has gotten much easier to reach.  In fact I've not yet FAILED to reach it since starting to flyfish.

This past Sunday (May 19, 2013), I beat the 1,000 fish mark for the year.  I checked my previous fishing logs to see if this was the fastest I've reached 1,000 fish.  Nope.  That honor goes to last year, when I reached 1,000 fish on May 9, 2012...10 days earlier.

Well, comparing years is interesting to me.  You see, in 2012 we had a very early and very warm Spring.  I ice-fished into late February, and then within 6 days of my last ice-fishing trip, I was flyfishing open water on February 25.  In February and March combined, I fished 52 times!

2013 has been very different from that.  A very cool Spring with bad ice that stayed on the lakes much longer than last year.  We had a good snowfall in May!  In fact, I only fished a total of 5 times total in February and March, and between my last ice-fishing trip in early February, I didn't fish at all for 51 days.  I finally got to flyfish open water on March 27...over a month later than last year!  So, only being behind last year's fish-caught numbers by 10 days seems pretty good to me.  :)

And so far this year I've caught 13 different fish species (12 on fly gear), including 2 new species on fly gear (for me)...Pumpkinseed Sunfish and Bigmouth Buffalo.

So, all in all, its been a pretty decent year for fishing so far.

What's a blog post without pictures??
In the past week, we had 2 consecutive evenings with Tornado WARNINGS in our town.  So, in honor of those...here's a picture I took on each of those days while fishing:

But....this IS a (mainly) Fishing Blog, so here's a couple fish from late last week...a big 9" Green Sunfish, and a 12" Black Crappie sporting spawning colors: