Greetings, Pond Boss friends!
Looking back over the summer, I'm amazed at what's happened...again. Not long ago, July would happen and time would seemingly stop. Pond management business would grind to a halt, scorching hot summer temperatures would take our breath and I would have some time to catch up. My original plan was to take a week, maybe ten days, head to the mountains, probably New Mexico, read, write and rest. Not so this summer.
Here are a few photos and explanations for what's been going on. Naturally, there's too much to share in this space, so I'll hit the highlights...and there are some good ones.
July 20-25 LL,2 hosted Kids Outdoor Zone Pink. We had 9 girls here at the house with two lady chaperones and the leader, my friend T.J. Greaney. Most of the folks live near Round Rock, Texas. The mission was to fellowship and help the girls with their spirituality...that's the purpose of KOZ. (They have a webpage at
www.kidsoutdoorzone.com) Originally, TJ designed the organization for boys in need of spiritual mentoring, or kids from single parent families. Not long into it, some girls started seeking the Lord through KOZ, so TJ set up KOZ Pink. Here, they learned how to catch fish, how to identify them, how to clean them and eat them. They also learned a little fisheries biology, dragging a seine, studying population dynamics and just general "fish" stuff all the way around.
Here are the girls posing with their catfish, just before they learned how to skin, gut, fillet, cook and eat the catch.
A few days after the girls left, Debbie and I headed to West Palm Beach, Florida for the Purina Mills Dealer Expo. (I'm so sorry, Sue Cruz...I thought about calling you just as we left...I owe you.) I had an airplane ticket bought and just a few days before takeoff, Debbie suggested she might want to tag along. Well, if you've never bought an airplane tickets four days before a flight, it ain't cheap. Then, my bride said she wanted to take our two year old granddaughter, Jentry. Oh my...that meant driving that 1,300 miles with a baby in a car seat. Princess, 'er Queen Debbie was VERY pursuasive...actually she wasn't pursuasive at all. She was going and that was that. So, we did.
I can now sing every nursery rhyme in two languages. And, believe me, the wheels on the bus DO go round and round. Twinkle, twinkle has a whole 'nuther meaning to me now.
That sweetheart child was a darling the whole trip. Of course, Debbie, being the grandmother she is, had all kinds of kid things packed from dolls to movies to books to snacks to cd's. We stopped often enough on the way down. On the way back, we rang ewest's phone and he and his bride, Ruth, graciously invited us to stay the night at their house. We had a great time.
Instead of being gone 2 1/2 days, (had I flown), the road trip ended up lasting 8.
On the way back, we stopped at Cocoa Beach and let Jentry make her first venture into the ocean. Those little two foot waves may as well have been two stories tall to that baby. She stayed a safe distance from saltiness.
The next day after getting home, we turned around and drove to Chicago to gather Debbie's grown daughter for a visit back home. Debbie hasn't seen her for several years, so their reunion was a special time. That trip took only four days. We decided to drive straight through on the way back, about 800 miles.
By now, we were headed into the third week of August and I had agreed to speak at 5 Wildlife Expos for Purina Mills in Texas. The first was in Jacksboro and the next evening in Mineral Wells, Texas. So, I thought it wise to use the daytime to accomplish a few things and then do the speaking engagements at night. I contacted our friend Steve Alexander, with Private Water Fishing and offered to electrofish some of his properties for a steep discount, in order to train my newest biologist, Josh Flowers, how to use the Smith-Root electrofishing boat. It was a win-win-win deal for all of us. Josh learned much about the boat, Steve got an idea of the fisheries of five different lakes and I got to tag along and get some goode photos.
It was scalding hot...too hot to electrofish, but we were cautious and the fish did very well. We probably didn't collect sample sizes and numbers as we would have had we waited until fall, but we caught some representative fish of each population...enough to draw a few conclusions.
Josh (l) and Steve pose during the hottest part of that August 17.
Who says you can't shock up a big bass in hot weather? This fish was sitting next to a grass line in five feet in clear water. We caught her, weighed and measured, shot several pictures and turned her loose.
Shortly after that trip, Josh went with me to Fredericksburg, Texas, to meet up with a long time Pond Boss reader to look at the prospects of building a lake. Since we were in the area, I called Alan Warren to let him know we were in the neighborhood (sorry, Sue, I won't ever forget to call you...ever). Alan has started a radio show over the last year and has had me as a guest almost every Saturday morning. So, we met up with Alan at 4:45 that Saturday at the WOAI studios in San Antonio and did a live radio show. It was a fun, frantic two hours. You can listen to his show from 5-7 a.m. every Saturday at WOAI.com if you wish. His show is now on a number of stations around the country. Here are some images of that morning.
