You know you need to fish more when your boat becomes a tree nursery. I recently had to harvest my boat. Got a good crop of little maple trees. Now all I need to do is fish more before it fills up with snow.
Mildale Farm, located at 35250 W. 199th St. Edgerton, KS, is a Johnson County Parks & Recreation event facility featuring 22 rolling acres adjoining 600 acres of future parkland. A huge equestrian-style barn serves as the main building and is surrounded by several smaller buildings. The barn is available for weddings, reunions, corporate retreats, etc. If you have reservations about holding a primary event of your life in a barn you needn’t worry. The barn has never been used to stable horses and is very nice.
Nine ponds scattered across the area are only open to public fishing on Community Day, which takes place once in the spring and again in the fall. Being as how the place is owned by Johnson County Parks & Rec. it seems odd to me that public fishing is only allowed twice a year. But what do I know? Maybe you can get married in the barn, grab your rod and fish a while, then go back into the barn for your divorce.
My friend Terry Robbins and I joined several other anglers Saturday, April 26th to sample the ponds. Fly fishing into a brisk breeze we caught and released a mixture of bass, bluegill and crappie. Maybe Parks & Rec. has a good reason for the catch-and-release regulations but it seems odd considering the light fishing pressure. Such restrictive regulations can only result in an overpopulation of stunted fish.
You’re a whitetail buck and the rut is on. Your neck is swollen with lust, you’re rubbing your new antlers on every little tree you can find and making scrapes in the ground all over your territory trying to find the right girl for you. What is your worst nightmare?
The other day my wife played bridge with a woman who brought along a Cocker spaniel. She said it was a service dog. When my wife asked what kind of service a Cocker spaniel could provide, the woman said the dog was trained to pick things up off the floor for its owner. You know, for old geezers like us who can’t bend over…and get back up.
Most service dogs I’ve seen have been Labs, goldens, or German shepherds. My Labs have all been smart dogs but I can’t see them being trained to pick things up off the floor and give them to me. When any of my Labs found anything on the floor they would automatically eat it, roll in it, or try to have sex with it.
Cocker spaniels were once upland hunting dogs but down through the ages their hunting instincts were bred out of them. I know people like that. I call them Human Cocker Spaniels. They think meat is something you buy wrapped in paper at the grocery store… or they don’t eat it at all.
That’s why, when people refer to me as a Neanderthal, I take it as a compliment.
I said this blog would be about outdoor sports. Well, world war two was mostly fought outdoors so it qualifies.
When I read Bill Mauldin’s “Up Front” at the tender age of nine I knew I had to become a cartoonist. After all, I was qualified: I was a smartass and I liked to draw.
Mauldin claims he had at least one ancestor fighting in every American conflict since the Revolutionary War. He’s been quoted as saying he is most proud of the fact that every one of them was an enlisted man. Not a single officer in the whole bunch!
Surely his characters Willie and Joe still resonate with today’s GIs in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Remember the classic Disney movie Bambi that we all saw when we were kids? If memory serves me correctly the cruel hunters shot Bambi’s mom. Normal kids were horrified but personally I thought the bitch had it coming.
This little clip is from my book Antlers Away, available on Amazon.com or you can order one from me and I’ll sign it and draw a little picture of a deer inside the front cover at no extra charge.
Remember Beavis and Butt Head? Could you identify with them? Me neither, but I thought they were funny in a junior high school sort of way. Maybe I would’ve liked them even more if they had been fly fishermen… like Orvis and Bead Head.
Stroll down the aisles of any tackle shop today and look at the shelves. Where are the Heddon Crazy Crawlers and Lazy Ikes of our youth? What has happened to the Fred Arbogast Hawaiian Wigglers, the Bass-O-Renos? They’ve all been replaced by thirty-seven feet of shelf space devoted to … you guessed it… PLASTIC WORMS!
We hear a lot about global warming but an even more disastrous fate awaits mankind if we don’t quell the proliferation of those squiggly, wiggly plastic imposters. Mark my words, they’re taking over. Today, a small lake near you. Tomorrow, the world. Yes, the number one threat facing mankind today is not climate change, not income inequality, not poverty or lack of health insurance, it’s….GLOBAL WORMING!
