I guess you've all begun to believe that we've totally given up on staying in touch with this blog. The fact is that we've stayed busy enough that we just haven't kept up very well.
I could try to do a quick re-cap on the summers events, but I don't think that's necessary. The reason I decided to post again was because of what my wife and I did last night.
Yesterday morning, Jenny and I decided to go fishing. So I called up a neighbor who has a nice pond, and asked for permission to go fishing. He was agreeable, so we lined up my mom to take care of Gwendolyn for us, so we could do a fishing date. Jenny had some work to do in the morning, and so Gwen went with her Daddy to Walmart to get some nightcrawlers and to do some other things. She seemed to enjoy that, although it's the first time she's gone around by herself with her Daddy like that. He was appropriately pleased that she enjoyed her time with him, as he's not sure what he'd have done otherwise.
After doing some mowing and such, we took Gwen to the folks and left her there while we went fishing. It was a beautiful evening (I'm sorry I didn't take the camera along). The sun was a little warm, but there was plenty of shade. There was no breeze and the only imperfections on the surface of the water were the plop our our lures and bobbers, and the fish breaking the surface. One feature of this pond that is always neat (although sometimes frustrating) is that fish seem to always be breaking the surface somewhere or other. Catching them isn't always as easy as it seems it should be, but as least you know they are there.
Jenny continued in her tradition of catching the first three fish or so. She caught a few little bluegills on her worm and bobber setup. She was sitting on a fallen tree trunk, about four feet above the water, fishing in between weeping willows that hung into the water. I was fishing a ways away from her when I heard her excitedly fighting a fish. Her exclamation, "It's huge!" was enough to make me come running, since I knew that she'd have trouble getting a big fish out without it snagging, or simply breaking her six pound test as she lifted it over her log. She got her bass up beside the bank, and as I ran up it came off her line. I vaulted the log, into the water and grabbed it before it could get clear of the weeds in the waters edge.
Following that excitement, I decided that perhaps a worm and bobber was the way to go. Jenny managed to get another bass about the same size as the first, and I started catching bluegill. To you Wisconsinites, a bluegill is a sunfish. The largest bluegill we caught was eight and a half inches, and I can tell you that catching one of those is about like hooking a bass. It's doubly exciting when you have a eight foot wide window of water, and you can't let them go either right or left of that or they'll snag and break your line. We got about four really nice bluegill and a few smaller ones. Sitting side by side on a big old log watching our bobbers as the sun set would have been very romantic and nice, except that we were so busy reloading worms and catching fish that we didn't have time to think about it too much.
As the sun set, fishing slowed, but I decided to try dropping my worm into a place that was very hard to get to. I could just squeeze in between some trees and toss my line out about eight feet. My first cast in, I knew I was in for some fun when there was a splash by my bobber and it went flying up as a fish struck it. About two seconds later, the bobber was underwater and heading for the snags. I managed to get that one in and found him to be a sixteen inch bass. I think he was the biggest, but we didn't measure the others, they were all really close to the same. I dropped my line back in to that spot, and immediately my bobber started moving again. This bass was about the same as the first one, and came in protesting. I tried once more, and my luck finally failed. Another bass (I say a bigger one) took my worm, and after I tried to persuade him to join the rest of his buddies in my bucket, negotiations failed and he took several wraps around a snag, after which I spent the next five minutes unwinding my tangled bobber from the branches in the vicinity of my left ear, and he undoubtedly bragged to his friends about how big he was and showed off his new lip ring.
So a good time was had by all. Oh and here's a carrot to you Wisconsinites. Come on down and I'll take you fishing!
~GB
And a little more of a closeup...
