wolc123

Pulled beef street tacos.

The Eisenhower farm is always my favorite part on our yearly trip here. It is still closed due to covid but we did a drive by today. The crowds are way down which is kind of nice but has to be hurting the businesses.

Have you visited Gettysburg ? Lots of it is closed now due to covid. We saw the monument to general Reynolds today. He was the corps commander for the 3 Cramer boys and was also killed on July 1 1863.

Has the op been banned ?

That sucks that they hung Newman out to dry like that. He always provided the best entertainment on the morning show.

Mostly to shoulder blades and string jump on deer that were put on high alert by catching a glimps of a draw. That ain't needed with a crossbow, hence my100 percent recovery rate with that.

We stopped by to put 3 shiney Lincolns on the stone for my friends great, great great grandfathers 3 brothers who got killed in the big battle.

Every year, I appreciate those two weeks of crossbow season in the southern zone a little more. Last year was the best yet, when I killed my best 8-point on opening day. I am so thankful that those two weeks include all of the rut, which has always been my favorite time to hunt. Over my first 32 years of archery hunting, I killed and recovered 6 deer with two different compounds (I never killed one that I recovered with my first compound, but one that I got a bad hit on with it likely perished). I also missed one clean and struck 4 in the shoulder blade, which likely recovered from their wounds. I know for certain that one of those did because a friend took it later with a gun and it was very well healed up. That 50/50 ish recovery percentage wasn't cutting it for me. I respect the deer that I hunt and they deserve better than that. The crossbow has been the answer for me. In just (6) years of hunting just the 2-week crossbow season, my take with that weapon is just one shy of my 32 year total with the compounds. More importantly, there has been no misses or unrecovered hits. Is the crossbow easier ? Prior to the crossbow's entry in 2014, archery season never had much impact on my families food supply. Since then, it has often given me more than gun season. All that extra time not hunting or practicing has also come in handy. Now if only NY state would do something for the folks in the northern zone to let them have a bit more than the paltry three days they got now before the guns (early ML season) opens, everything would be really great. To the three compound hunters on this thread who are still fighting the crossbow tooth and nail, I suggest moving to Oregon. They have the even tastier blacktail deer and may be the only state that still allows no crossbow hunting. I don't expect to see that though. I would be happy if they would understand why I am so thankful to be able to hunt the entire rut in the southern zone, with the weapon of my choice.

The time I got my largest I was actually trying for them. We had been hooking into at least one on every drift, breaking most off. I switched to the heaviest outfit on the boat, loaded with 14lb line, doubled up the last 15 in, and tied on my largest bass jig. I attached a huge rubber lizard to that and lowered it down. The big one picked up that bait almost immediately. After a 20 min battle, it looked ready for the net, but had saved enough strength for one more good run. It had spent everything it had left on that last run, so it was either lewiston or my wall. I chose the latter.

We get a few musky by accident on the upper Niagara. My biggest was a 48 in back when they had to be 44 in to keep. Today it hangs above the bar in our billiard room. These days they got to be over 54 in to keep. I am not sure how many of the shorties survive after the trip to the boat on 8 pound test bass tackle. We always do our best to be gentle on them but I suppose a few have probably gone over the falls belly up. During that bass tournament a few years ago a 40 incher ripped a 16 in smallmouth off my line.

That is basically my home water (I can be at the launch in 1/2 hour). I am usually able to get smallies there any time of bass season and this usually is the easiest time to get lots of them (late post spawn). I stayed away from there for a few years, after they dredged up the Buffalo river for fear of what chemicals they may have dredged up, but they should be good eating again by now. As mentioned many times, I am not big into "catch and release". We started keeeping a few again last season and they were pretty good and I felt safe enough to feed them to my wife and girls. I will be in other places for the rest of this month (PA, VA, St Lawrence), but will probably start in again on the upper Niagara in mid-August or so. By that time the smallies where be deeper there, but I know a lot of their hiding spots. I am trying to locate largemouth in the Upper river. A couple years ago, we fished a bass tournament there and probably had the three largest bass overall of the tournament. We got the prize for the biggest bass (recouping our entry fee) but half the 6 allowed bass had to be Largemouth and we got skunked on them. We finished third place overall, loosing out to two boats who found some Largemouth. I was not real happy with the tournament thing because they made us release the fish, but the nieghbor kid talked me into it. I probably would not have agreed if I had known about the (3) largemouth / (3) smallmouth technicality.

I use plain old round-head bucktail jigs most of the time for the extra satisfaction of getting them on lures that I made myself but mainly because I am so cheap. I pour my own heads, shoot my own deer, pick up road kill tails, etc, so all I need to buy are the hooks and they litterally cost pennies. I always use as light of one as I can (1/8 oz works perfect for bass suspended down 5 feet). The lighter jigs are also easier to get a good hookset with and tougher for the bass to throw after they are hooked. They tend to be spooky in the clear calm water though so any lighter than that is tough to reach out far enough on the casts to fool them.

This is a fun time of year to chase smallies, as they leave the shoreline structure and head out over deep water. It can make things tough on big waters like Erie, but not too much trouble on a deep little Adirondack lake. The best time was the first and last hours of daylight when the wind was nill and the surface as smooth as glass. Then it is just a matter of watching for boils as they break the surface chasing up baitfish. Cast a jig to those spots, count to 5 or so, give it a twitch or two, and more often than not, you soon have one on. My favorite part, being cheap and lazy, is that there are no snags out there and the same jig lasted me all weekend. I imagine I will get most of the summer out of the same one. I ended up with 9 nice 13 to 16 inch "keepers" last weekend and a few shorts. It was not real fast action with lots of rowing between rises, but man do they pull.

No such thing. You mean "lawnmowers".

Great idea. Similar to what I suggested, but you are giving the compound/crossbow guys a few more weeks. It makes a lot of sense to group the compound with the crossbow. Oddly enough, all of the anti-crossbow bowhunters that I know of, only hunt with compounds. I wonder if the OP realizes that the members of this site have consistently supported full-inclusion of the crossbow in archery season by a 3:1 margin ? Maybe it's time for another poll. As I stated above, I have grown quite content with the two weeks that we have now, down in the sz. If the poll had "leave it 2 weeks" as an option, I might even go for that over full-inclusion. It is nice to have the extra time early for squirrel, turkey, & rabbit hunting along with some more fall smallmouth bass fishing. The real problem, is up in the northern zone, where the crossbow only gets 3 days before the early ML season. Whats up with that ? Must be that NYB has more influence up there.

Other than having just 3 days before the guns come in in the nz, I am quite content with the ny crossbow season. Having the best 2 weeks of the archery season in th sz has worked out well very well for me. A couple tweaks that would make things better would be, add 11 days to the nz, and also limit the vertical compound guys to the last 14 days. Traditional archery guys like the OP deserve some early time to themselves.

You have witnessed the power of fresh sprouting soybeans to draw in deer from miles around. I am not aware of any plot that draws them in better than young soybeans (pods are overrated). Since climate change and late frosts, you can have usually get that "early" draw thru most of bow season. To do that, you got to hold off until about September to plant. I have been doing that the last few years and it works pretty good. I mix the soybeans with wheat and white clover. Just get the plot worked up and broadcast the soybeans and wheat, then cultipack. Next, broadcast the white clover and cultipack again (those tiny seeds dont like to be pushed in that deep). The soybeans provide the early drawing power, and then the wheat holds the deer on the plots for late-season action. The wheat is mowed off the following spring, and then the white clover takes over and provides a few more years of attraction. Your brassica/turnip idea in a few weeks ain't bad, but I would also get some more soybeans, along with some wheat and white clover and get some of that in from late August to early September.

We did the auto tour of the battlefields with CD's last year and it was good. I like it that you can do it at your own pace and spend as long as you want at any of the stops. Our girls liked the tower monument, that they could climb up in, by little Round top. I think that marks the spot where the boys from Main turned the tide on the 2nd day. They also liked the Jenny Wade house tour. My favorite attraction in that town is the Eisenhower farm, which we have visited nearly every year for the last 18. One of these years I am going to talk the tour guide into letting me take a picture of our girls sitting on miss Mamie's pink "French Poof" round couch in the formal sitting room. In 2015, I three-putted on Ike's private green, using a cane for a putter and a golf ball I carried in in my pocket. I pretended to have a limp (needing a cane) and oddly enough I was stricken by a bad case of Siatica shortly thereafter. That hobbled me up so bad thru deer season, that I got skunked that year. A year or two prior to that, I checked out his Trap and Skeet range, which looks good from a distance, but needs lots of work when you look up close. The show barn, at the back of the farm, is usually a tough walk under the hot sun but well worth it, especially if one of the wise volunteers is back there to answer my questions about Ike's prize winning beef operation. They actually raised Angus cattle for taste back then, and he really had that process down, almost as well as he handled leading the European theater of operations during the big one. I am still trying to find out what caused the big dent in the hood of the Allis Chalmers in the back stall. Last but not least, O'roarks has the best corn-beef and cabbage that I have ever tasted. We are headed back there soon, and I can't wait. We always stay in a hotel that is a short walk from that fine establishment. My interest in that battle was peaked by a story from a couple of my former coworkers (both who have now passed away). The father and son's lives resulted from a real life "Saving Private Ryan" which began on the first day of that battle in 1863. That was the day when their grand/great grandfather's three brothers (all from the 142 PA) were hit by Confederate fire. Two were killed outright, and the third lingered for a few days at the make-shift hospital in the Lutheran Seminary. A fourth brother (my friend's patriarch) was released from service due to that day's tragedy. You can still find the brother's name in the patient registry at the Seminary museum. A few years ago, my daughter and I located his gravestone, and we left a fresh shiny Lincoln penny on it. We also left a couple more on stones marked "unknown" for the other two brothers. Ted Turner did a great job on his movie. Running low on ammo, fix bayonets, charge down hill and keep the Rebs from turning the flank. That was the instant that the South's back was broken and the Union was saved.

Yep, it will be here before we know it. On my drive to work this morning, just around the corner from our place, I had to stop the car to wait for a deer to cross. That one did not have any antlers, nor did the other slightly smaller one, which was just behind her. Farther behind them, about 50 yards off the road, stood a pair of what looked like 2-year old bucks, each with fat velvet antlers extending a few inches wider than their ears. I got a lot more fish to catch, before I start focusing too much on deer, but that sight did not help the situation much.

I don't pass too many bucks, but almost every time that I have, I was rewarded with a significantly larger one. Several times (including last crossbow season) that happened within a few minutes. Thus, I can honestly say that I have never regretted a pass. Even though I am a pure meat hunter, those passes have always netted me significantly more meat. I don't pass to get bigger antlers, but rather to get more meat. A large percentage of my meat comes from bucks, because neighboring farmers have usually depleted the local antlerless herd on their nuissance permits, prior to October 1. That forces me to be selective with my (2) buck tags. If I blow that tag on the first little spike that wanders into range, I would have to endure a lot more store bought chicken on the dinner table, and I am no fan of that. I live in a zone where it is always easy to get up to (4) DMP tags and I seldom fill all of them. After my buck tag is punched, I always keep hunting hard to fill them DMP tags, until our year's venison supply is secured. During those "post buck tag punch" hunts, I have never even saw a buck that was larger than the one that I tagged, let alone had a chance to kill one. So while I have never regretted a "pass", I have also never regretted a kill. I know at least one member here who has struggled a bit with that issue. Someday it might happen to me, but I am thankful that it has not yet. Last year, after killing my big (8) with the crossbow, a spindly little (4)-point offered me a 20 yard broadside shot, and that was the only other chance I had at any deer until gun season opened up. Even though I am a "pure" meat hunter, I will admit that I don't hunt quite as hard after my buck tag is punched. Without a doubt, that is partly responsible for my lack of "big buck" sightings later. It also has not helped that my last (3) bucks (all 3.5 year olds) were nearly large enough on their own to provide our family's year's worth of venison. We still have about half of the vacuum sealed grind left in the freezer from my 2018 gun buck. I always zip-lock the grind from the first deer every fall and use that up first. There is no point in wasting the time and money on vacuum sealing for something that will be in the freezer for only a few months.

I am expecting my hunting at home to improve a bit this season, thanks to Covid-19, because fuel and fertilizer prices were both near "inflation-adjusted" all time lows this spring. That, coupled with near ideal weather conditions, allowed me to bump up the corn acreage a bit. This is the first year in many that I will have plenty of knee-high corn by the Fourth of July. I am also expecting some improvement, up in the northern zone, at my in-laws place. I should have enough vacation days to spend the whole early ML season up there, plus a day or two of their early crossbow season. The last few years I have slacked off a bit up there mostly due to not spending enough time. Much of my venison the last three years has come from my folks place, which is on the opposite corner of the same DMU that my place is in. The hunting imroved big-time there since a new "highly-motivated" nieghbor bought the big overgrown field out back. That field is bordered on two sides by my folk's woods, so he is very nice to us. He single-handedly eliminated the tresspassing issues that have plagued that property for many years, through massive posting and courtroom prosecution efforts. I am certain that he will have no problem stepping up his efforts to ward off any attempted increase in tresspassing or poaching. He actually seems to get off on that. Finally, I identified a need to step up my late ML season hunting last year. I am going to up the powder charge on my T/C Omega from (2) to the max of (3) pellets. That should help use up my remaining supply of triple 7 and allow a faster changeover to Blackhorn 209. That and remembering to bring my laser rangefinder, should step up my long-range game a bit. My shot fell short last season, up at my buddies place in the southern tier. They have a real hot-spot for that time they are encouraging me to try again this year. Hopefully, my tags will be punched by then, but if not, I am there. When it comes to selection, I am not making any changes. I will still look for a decent 6-point or better for the first half of the seasons (Archery/ML, and Gun). Any buck goes after the mid-point. It has been a few years since I filled both my buck tags and it would be nice if I could do that this season. The covid-thing has not affected our eating much, since most of our protien has came from wild-game as long as I can remember anyhow. We are eating out a bit less though, so another deer or two would not hurt. Our venison supply is holding out ok, but I am struggling a bit with the fish. I finally managed my first bass limit of the season this morning though, so that might be turning around. It was good to see that they have finally finished spawning out on Lake Erie (first time cleaning them this season and not finding any eggs).

Regardless of how the pizza turned out, it looks like you got the right beverage. I am down to my last of them and the market didn't have any at my last stop. Looks like I will have to settle for Modelo Negras up at the in-laws next weekend. My father in law built a fancy big brick pizza oven at his old house a couple years before he sold it. We only had a few pizza parties over there but they were very good. I could not believe how fast those pizzas cooked over that hot wood fire. It seemed like the average cook time was only 5 minutes or so. I have to drive by the place some day and see if the new owners kept the oven.

It is #2 on my top 5 list, right after another, older Henry Fonda movie without Jane (Never give and inch). Jaws is # 3, Patton # 4, and the original "True Grit" is # 5. I will have the old "Ethyl Thayer" 1956, 5-1/2 Evinrude along for backup out on lake Erie tomorrow, but it likely wont get fired up until the upcoming Holiday weekend, when I will have it on my father in law's 14 foot Meyers rowboat, up in the Adirondacks. A few years ago, on that same long weekend, I used that rig to tow a big party boat full of folks from across the lake back to their lakeside mansion. Their modern four-stroke outboard crapped out and would not start, probably due to too much ethanol gas and lack of maintenance.

My brother and sisters own one, but they have a secluded waterfront cottage where they leave it docked for the season. A drawback on trailering pontoon boats is that they are very difficult to launch and recover if there is any significant cross-wind. They are also difficult to attach to a dock in a cross wind. I fight that myself now and then with the big one my father in law has up at his place in the Adirondacks. If there is any wind over 5 mph, we just leave it tied at the dock and take out the v-hull rowboats. My brother and sister have a much easier time with theirs on a wind-protected cove off the St Lawrence river. My father in law's is on an open lakeshore that is almost always subjected to the prevaling SW winds. If you have to trailer it, I would recommend an open-bow v-hull boat as they are a lot easier to control at the boat launch. You might still be able to get an Evirude E-Tech, but all other outbaords made today are 4-stroke as far as I know. I don't care for them because they are so much heavier than the 2-strokes. I always dread the job of carrying my father in law's super heavy Honda 4-stroke up the steep stairs at his place every fall, for winter storage.