wolc123

While I was bush-hogging our front field this evening, (3) deer were out feeding in a wheat/white clover plot, just across the creek, that I planted last September and mowed a week ago. They were liking that clover so much, that they didn’t even look up, when I passed by within 40 yards with my tractor about 5 times. It looked like a family group, with a mature doe and a yearling doe staying close together, and a yearling buck about 15 yards away. I hope the big doe and/or another one just like her hangs around about three more months. I’d like to take (2) like that, during the September antlerless gun season, that has been approved again this year. That season is 9 days long and includes (2) weekends. Ideally, I could take (1) doe the first weekend, keep the carcass in my deer fridge almost a week, process it Friday night, then repeat the process for the next week. My old deer fridge really only holds one mature deer properly, although I have squeezed (2) into it a few times when I had to. Proper refrigerated aging is critical for any mature red meat in warm weather, if one likes it good and tender, even for ground meat. I don’t care for tough burger. That would give us plenty of ground venison, which we use a lot of, and enable me to be more selective with my (2) antlered tags later. The (2) “leftover” 9F antlerless tags won’t become available until after that early gun season. That works out well for me, due to my refrigeration limitation and the fact that I love hunting the Holiday ML season (also approved again for this year). This barely gives me time for bass fishing, but I got the big boat motor running on the garden hose, and the boat ready last Sunday. I hope to get out this weekend for some upper Niagara smallmouth. The wife and kids would get sick of venison, if that’s all I fed them. It don’t matter much to me what food costs at the store. I prefer the “free” stuff that comes as a bi-product from my “paid” entertainment. Sure glad I don’t play golf.

With all the recent rain, the food lots are way too wet for any serious work. I tried a short pass with the drag that I just fixed a broken tooth on. The 2 acre corn plot is doing ok, but will definitely benefit from cultivation and some Roundup, if I can get on it in a couple weeks. The grass and other weeds are coming in better than the corn right now. I like to let the corn get up about 1-1/2 to 2 feet tall before I do that, to avoid burying it with the cultivator. My old Ford 8n is running a little rough and sounding like it could use some new spark plugs. I will run up to Lockport on my way home from work Monday and get a set. I will swing by a Runnings for a couple more boxes of 12 ga Hornady SST slugs, if they have any. Early antlerless gun season is now less than 3 months away, so it’s time to get my M512 slug gun dialed in.

That’s why I like the corded ones better than the battery ones when it comes to electrics. If I am out of range of an extension cord, I bring one of my a gas saws and/or my generator (if a ladder is involved).

I have a 14” corded electric that I use on ladders if it is absolutely necessary to do so. It’s light weight is nice, but the silent operation lets me hear the sounds of impending doom, when branches start breaking, barn roofs start falling, etc. If I was up there with a loud gas saw, I’d take more limbs on the head, because I wouldn’t hear them coming over the sound of the exhaust. Ladders and chain saws are a combination to avoid if at all possible as that video someone posted earlier clearly shows. I managed that this morning, by wrapping a chain around the lower part of some big, freshly broken maple branches. The branches broke part way and were left hanging down to the ground, when my great great grandfather’s last old barn fell down next to the tree. Rather than borrow a pole saw or go up on a ladder, I ripped them down, from ground level with my tractor. I reduced them to firewood and smalls down on the ground with my corded electric saw. Sure there’s some jagged edges up there now, but they will blend in in a year or two. There’s enough left of the base of that one branch , so that I won’t even have to move the kids tire swing. You can see how close that barn came to the tree in the bottom photo. Fortunately, the kids were not swinging when it fell. That 11” square 36 ft long crossbeam, coming down from 16 ft up, might have done some serious damage.

There is definitely an optimum liqueur level for operating a chainsaw. If I have that just right, I can drop just about any tree on a dime. 3 or 4 Genny lights gets me is the “sweet spot”.

Sometimes, steel leaders can be a turnoff in the ultra clear water. I have had pretty good luck by just doubling my last foot of monofilament line. I don’t target northerns much up there anymore, but when they are breaking off my spinnerbaits (they love big double willow leaf blade chartreuse spinnerbaits), I can usually stop that by doubling my last foot of line. Slow rolling big spinnerbaits over submerged weedbeds is usually a good way to get them. They also love big weedless black rubber skirted bass jigs, tipped with a rubber shad-tail trailer. This 38 incher went for a chartreuse spinnerbait over a deep weed edge on Lake of the Isles.

Oddly enough, that happened to me twice, about 15 minutes apart, over this past Memorial Day weekend up in the Adirondacks, with 1/8 oz bucktail jigs. I don’t ever recall smallmouth doing that before, so maybe it’s a spring thing. The first one (looked to be around 18” long), must have wrapped around a sharp rock and broke me off down on the bottom. It jumped twice over the next couple minutes, trying to dislodge that jig. When I tied on another, a few casts later, another one broke off rather easily down on the bottom, and then jumped 3 times. My line must have got frayed up more than I noticed from the first one. They both looked a little longer than the 17 incher in the first picture (caught on my favorite smallmouth surface bait) but a couple inches shorter than the 20-1/2” in the last picture. I caught that one on my last 1/8 oz jig after making sure my knot and line were good. A nice thing about them jumping, after breaking off down low, is that you are not left wondering just how big they might have been.

We will just have to see if the folks are going to be duped into voting for any Democrats come November. Notice how the distractions are ramping up: Gun control, abortion debate, January 6th congressional hearings. I put the cutoff at $5.25 per gallon. If gas is higher than that on Election Day, all the distractions they can muster won’t keep too many of them in office. Let’s hope it breaks $ 7 a gallon by then, which is what it would probably take to clear them all out. Drill baby drill.

I remember one of those “hungry” days, about 5 years ago, on a shallow weedy bay on the St. Lawrence. My brother in law and I had kept 9 bass that morning, on a deeper bay across the river. I cleaned those fish when we got back to their cottage at lunch time. After I washed and put away the knife and other fish cleaning supplies, my youngest daughter was out on the dock and we heard screaming. She was about 12 years old at the time, had been trying to hook a can, that was floating on back of the weed mat, within a few feet of shore. She had a push button zebco outfit with a bare jig head. A 3 pound largemouth engulfed that jig right next to that floating can. She wanted me to clean it for her, but I didn’t want to get the stuff dirty again for just one fish. She continued to protest, so I told her to put it in my boat’s livewell and I turned on the aerator. I jumped in a kayak with a weedless grass frog on my line . paddled over to the other side of the neighbor’s dock, and dropped that frog near the similar, west side, inside corner of that. A plump 5 pounder swallowed it whole, gave me my limit of bass for the day, and reason to get the knife dirty again. I think that might be the last bass that I landed on a grass frog. I guess that’s what the pros call “pattern fishing”.

I have tried different speeds with hooksets on those weedless grass frogs in the thick weed mats. It seems like some days, when they are real hungry maybe, they are easier to hook. Most days, they just play with them.

I can’t recall ever catching a bass on a Jitterbug, but I didn’t give it that much time. My grandfather had (3) in his tackle box, one black, one perch finish, and one blue back with white belly. I may have got a largemouth or two at night on the black one years ago. My favorite nighttime largemouth top bait water was a black Heddon tiny torpedo. Quite a few largemouth went for that on Cuba lake about 30 years ago. I don’t have a lot of luck with the weedless frogs. Lots of hits, but not that many hookups. I will see if I can find any of grandpas old Jitterbugs, and if I find one, I’ll give it a try on smallmouths this summer or fall. There ain’t no Largemouths in the lake where I go most of the time.

My favorite top water action is Heddon Zara-spook on dead calm water at first light and a fiesty smallmouth :

He shut down the Keystone pipeline and took other measures to squander America’s energy independence on his first day in office. No single individual is more directly responsible for the high prices we are paying at the pump and the failing economy we are all experienced today. The sad part is, he don’t know no better . I am not blaming him when the fault lies entirely with the fools who voted for him. Anyone with half a brain could see his incompetence by listening to a single sentence of his speech.

I am thankful that he picked and seated a black woman as a Supreme Court Justice. Once she learns that black fetuses have been aborted at more than double the rate of whites, she will have no problem getting onboard with overturning Roe vs Wade.

Prayers sent for your family.

Congrats Cynthia and crappy. I know how that feels. Our youngest daughter is also graduating from high school this summer. I will miss going to her games (field hockey and Lacrosse). I am thankful that she is going to a fairly close college this fall. Hopefully, we will be able to catch some of her games there over the next (4) years. Two nights ago, we watched her team win the local wny section Lacrosse championship, so we get to watch at least one more high school game today (in Moog’s new home town I think). After that, it might be another game or two at the state championships. Her field hockey team made the final four last fall and now her Lacrosse team has a chance. Apparently, a diet rich in “free” protein (venison and fish) is good for athleticism. She’s on the far right, kneeling in the first row.

As it turns out, my buddy hitting that deer paid off for him. Due to the spike in used car prices, his insurance company paid him significantly more than he paid for the car. He bought it back cheap, just finished up bolting on all the replacement parts, and is now driving a virtually “free” car, that is in better shape than it was before he hit the deer. I guess maybe I will keep passing them little antlered bucks with my crossbow after all.

That is the main reason why I struggle with passing any legal bucks while hunting. I passed the same small buck twice last year (once during crossbow season and again on opening day of gun). The second pass paid off for me (I used my gun tag on a much larger buck about a week later). I regret passing that small buck with my crossbow, just because I wanted more meat (antlers are not that important to me). As it turned out, my daughter’a high school field hockey playoff run took out the rest of my crossbow season, and I never filled my archery buck tag. To make matters worse, one of my best friends hit a buck with his car a few weeks ago (totaling it), less than a mile from where I passed that little fork-horn buck. Maybe it was the same buck. I hope that it was, because he was a mean little bastard, who injured the button buck that I killed over there on New Year’s Day. I had to throw out most of the brisket meat due to the pussy antler wound on his chest. I watched the “goring” in the clover field on opening day of gun last year, while I was eating lunch in the house with my parents. I would feel worse about passing him with my gun, had I not killed that bigger buck later. That one would have surely caused even more damage to his car, maybe even some physical harm to my buddy, had he struck it instead. The fact remains that I could have legally killed both of them bucks, had I not selfishly held out for a bigger one with my crossbow. Live an learn I guess. This season, if a 3” unicorn gives me an easy shot on my first crossbow hunt, I am going to take it. I’ll still pass the little guys before Thanksgiving with my gun though, as that has yet to come back to bite me. As hunters, we all have a hard time remembering that it’s not all about us and getting a big trophy. Others (motorists, farmers, and homeowners) depend on us getting the job done.

Prayers sent and thanks for the reminder. It sucks when you loose a friend suddenly like that, even though he is certainly in a better place now. Firearms are dangerous, but a lot more hunters are killed and injured in tree stand falls every year. I lost a neighbor to that last season. It pains me a bit to drive by his boat almost every day, on the way home from work. He never even got to winterize it last year.

What is your address there ?

Now that spring turkey season is winding down, it’s almost time to focus on deer. Per the DEC website, the early September antlerless gun season is a go again this year. I would be very thankful for a mature doe, during that season . We use a lot of ground venison, and getting one early would take some pressure off the later seasons.

I just checked the NY DEC website. Not only is the early antlerless gun season a go again this year (for the same wmu’s as last year), but so is the Adirondack antlerless ML, the extra half hours of hunting time before and after sunrise/sunset, and the Holliday ML is on again this year.

I believe that 20” year round applies to lakes Erie & Ontario, and the St Lawrence and Niagara rivers only.

Just nailed a 10” perch so it looks like the smallmouth bass nest robbers are not going to be set free.