More on Norm's ice fishing adventures

December 19, 2021 News Item:  A psychologist testifying for Ghislaine Maxwell at her federal sex trafficking trial has told the jury people can have "false memories.” of … events. Dr Elizabeth Loftus told the court in New York that people "can be subjected to post-event suggestion.” The professor testified that memory “doesn't work like a recording device. We are actually constructing our memories while we retrieve memories."

Admittedly none of this is particularly fishing related. But it does offer strong circumstantial evidence that many Covid Era fishing stories heard at LFC events probably would not hold up in court. We won’t mention names here, other than to say that Norm and Rick are reportedly ice fishing in Wyoming sometime Christmas week. You may be tempted to ask how Norm did. If so, all I can say is, listen to his response with a proper spirit of the holidays. (And then ask Gail.) Meanwhile, don't bother asking Wayne where he caught his bass last week.

Merry Christmas!

What we were doing on December 5, 2019

 My apologies for some of the language in this video, taken in early December at Lake John in 2019, in that giddy time before Covid-19, when high country lakes still had the decency to ice over. Merry Christmas.Video of Norm’s big brown

(RESENDING TO FIX DATE): Mark your calendar! Holiday meeting is the first day of winter, 2 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 21

As tradition dictates, no formal agenda for the December.  We'll run over the possibilities for club officers, head for the cookies and coffee, and  have our annual gift exchange.

No problem if you forget or choose not to participate in the gift exchange; just don't pick up a gift. Remember, if you want to participate, get something (new) for about 10 bucks, and wrap it up but don't put your name on it.  We have a kind of raffle to decide who gets to pick first.

 

The good news: Dowdy should be fishable this winter. West Lake, not so much

 Red Feather Lakes, CO. After the discovery of a nasty parasite infection at Red Feathers’ West Lake last summer, I’d hesitate before drilling a hole this winter in the popular northern Colorado pond. But the situation doesn’t appear nearly as severe at the adjacent, larger, Dowdy Lake. In fact, Dowdy should “still be a solid ice fishing option, according to Kyle Battige, Colorado Parks and Wildlife aquatic biologist and anglers’ friend. 

 For those unfamiliar with the situation at these two popular destinations northwest of Fort Collins, anglers in late July first reported sick and dying fish at 38-acre West Lake. Pathologists at CPW’s aquatic health laboratory identified the culprit as anchor worm, a really nasty parasite that causes severe inflammation resulting in open bleeding sores on fish. The females of the damned things permanently attach themselves to fish, leading to stress and cell damage and secondary infections, and mortality. And the immature stages of the anchor worm feed on gill tissue. 

 

It is a problem that reoccurs periodically in some slack waters including the two U.S. Forest Service lakes. CPW also says people can eat infected fish after removing the worms and cooking completely. (Though after seeing some of those poor trout first hand, I for one am not that hungry.)

Battige says anchor worm "can lead to mortality (but) it is not necessarily the ultimate end point for all fish. We have had anchor worm issues in the past and not seen the mortality issues that we did this year at West Lake." He adds, there’s “no good solution to eradicating anchor worm from the system,” but we’ll start with decreased stocking density.” 

 

He says Dowdy didn’t experience the infestations and related issues that popped up at West. In fact, the state was able to stock Dowdy with additional trout at the end of August, rounding out planned stocking for the season, but canceled remaining plants at West.

 

“We need to firm up decisions on management moving forward,” he says, “but there is not a good solution to eradicating anchor worm from the system. So my thoughts right now are to decrease stocking density at both lakes and see if that helps. But again, that isn’t the final decision necessarily.”

 

So, I wouldn’t recommend a West Lake ice fishing trip soon. But Battige says Dowdy “did not see the related die off that West Lake did, and should still be a solid ice fishing option.”

Anchor worms at work 

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

 

Okay, so this photo of a happy Barb Ding, Dennis Kelsey and Norm Englebrecht was taken back at Douglas Reservoir on the second day of the New Year in 2015, when it was clearly a bit cooler than it's been around here lately. Still, if they're out this warm Thanksgiving Day, they'll still be wishing everyone a Happy Holiday. 

Stay warm, friends, and stay safe. 

New Way to contact the club!

 We know. Put your e-mail out in public these days and you'll start hearing about the police wanting to confiscate your Microsoft account, or asking about your social security number. Makes it hard for us to communicate. You should have a copy of the club directory, maintained by Barbara Ding. But you can now send a note to the club using the following new e-mail account: 

fishingclubloveland@gmail.com 

Click on it and try it now, so I can see how it works. And tuck it away in your address book. 

If you're not writing from your Mama's basement, and don't talk about something besides fishing, we'll get back to you as soon as possible. Fish pictures and reasonaby truthful fishing reports encouraged; nothing too dirty and nothing political. 

Just remember we're retired, nap a lot, and may be out fishing. 

Flatiron Fishing Friday! After breakfast

 Bring your poles to breakfast at Perkins, and we’ll head afterward to flatiron reservoir. There’s an entry fee, so if you don’t have an annual pass we can ride over together. Should be there about 9 a.m.

A tolerant curmudgeon recalls Halloween in the '50s

If you insist that a posting like this be somehow related to fishing, maybe I will tell you at breakfast how we caught those carp. I would also like to say that, Halloween excepted, I was a pretty good kid.  Bill 

The "NextDoor" internet groups here in Colorado have been awash with complaints that rotten 21st Century kids took all the Halloween candy left untended in bowls on  porches. This semi-alarming news forces an admission from this 73-year-old retired trick or treater:  a concession that I - and my future minister brother Paulie - were pretty darned rotten during the Halloween seasons of the ‘50s. (I say seasons because the holiday in Granite City, IL back then wasn’t limited to a single night. You hit up neighbors a day or two before Halloween to get a proper sugar high, then returned to ones that gave the best treats.

Anyway, tired of youthful homeowners berating today’s youth (and secure in my knowledge that statutes of limitations have long passed), I cheerfully concede the following:

1. Did you steal some of little Denny Walk’s candy, and pilfer the Halloween bags of the Blanton girls looking for Snickers bars? 

A. Well yeah, but we left them all the Milky Ways.

2. Did you soap the inside of Larry Jackson’s car windows, while the two of you were on your way to apply festive red paint to the porch lights at St. Elizabeth School nunnery? 

A. Well yeah. Never did admit that to Larry, though, until just now.

3. Did you soap windows all up and down Warnock Avenue, then sit on the roof of your own home with a garden hose and spray other kids trying to do the same thing? 

A. Yeah, that was me all right. But I think Paulie and Jim Parker were up there with me.

4. Will you finally 'fess up to helping Jim and the future Rev. Paul hide those freshly dead carp in mail boxes and under porches up and down Warnock?

A. Yeah. Heh Heh. That was a warm autumn, too.

5. And finally, did you guys really set fire to bags of fresh dog poop on neighbors’ porches? 

A. Oh yeah, that was us all right. That Halloween trick just never got old, watching the neighbors cuss the flames.  In fairness, we always made sure to knock on the door or ring the doorbell, and watch from the shadows to make sure someone safely stomped out that stuff.

Point is, sheesh, leave today’s kids alone. As penance for my own youthful tricks, for years as a young adult I left pumpkins unguarded on the front porch. I eventually gave up after they rotted before ever being smashed. And I concede that most kids these days are generally not nearly as rotten as we were in the '50s. I doubt they even know what soaping a windows means.

Time to get out there and fish

 By Bill Prater

Regardless of what warm-natured folks are doing, now is not the time to put away the rod and reel and hope for an early spring. Okay, you may stand a fair chance of getting skunked, I guess. But late fall through winter  is also a great time for some of the year’s most memorable days on the water. Most of those annoying folks who crowded next to you in June and July are now watching football and Netflix horror shows, turning their attention to hunting, or hoping for early ice. So until the lakes and ponds at lower elevations freeze over until spring, they can be all yours and mine.

Fish do generally bunch up this time of year. Unless you scout out great locations in September or October, they can be hard to locate. For me, that means I stand a better chance in smaller lakes and ponds and smaller than the bigger ones.

I moved to Colorado in the early ‘80s after learning to fish the southern fringes of the Midwest. I’m embarrassed to say, it took me years out here to learn a few useful, basic facts about the differences between warm water fish species back there and here in Colorado. And it took me even longer to start to figure out trout.

I did learn early on that the most productive times for early warm water fishing in these parts generally begin later than they do in Southern Illinois and Missouri, and slow down earlier in the fall. What I didn’t realize, for reasons that escape me now, is that meanwhile trout of all sizes start hitting their prime when temperatures drop into the 50s, 40s and 30s. It is a terrific trout trait that extends right through ice-out, and helps explain why so many Coloradoans stand for hours on frozen lakes, hopefully dunking waxies into a hole in the ice.

I do appreciate trout metabolism

You can, of course, catch open water bass, crappie, bluegill and others this time of year; for me, at least, those species can be harder to locate and even slower to bite. Trout metabolisms and appetites, meanwhile, speed up to compensate for the sluggish ways of their warm water cousins.

As for catching any kind of fish, just get out there somewhere, and see what bites. I recommend hauling out your lightest line and gear, moving around a lot, and drastically downsizing baits. Also, some wise anglers will pontificate that you can’t reel a lure in fast enough to outrun a trout. That’s true, I guess, but during icy weather they seem grateful when lunch swims by more slowly. 

In telling you to get out in the cold, I concede I am not recommending common sense. But I will urge you to remember that misery and even hypothermia are possibilities, and you should prepare accordingly. Myself, and the yahoos who join me, try to use our float tubes all 12 months of the year. But we pretty much never go without a buddy and never without reasonable clothing and a reasonable maximum to our time on the water. (The increased urge to pee in cold water usually takes care of that.) 

Sketchy ice that is too thin to be useful is the bane of most winter-time Front Range anglers. While smaller bodies of water usually ice up, Chinook winds usually scour them open for at least brief periods even in January and February. Just be alert for warming trends, wear long johns, and scout for open stretches of water where you can cast your line with confidence.

Charlie Higgs' tale of a whale that didn't get away

 Friday seemed like a good day to be chasing stocker-size trout on Dragonfly Pond. But it proved to be an even better time for Charlie Higgs to be battling a trophy-size, 34-inch channel catfish. 

Who knew that lunker was lurking near the fishing dock, probably gobbling trout? Certainly not Charlie, who would have probably tied his nightcrawler onto something a little stouter than 6-pound line. Nor fishing buddies Christina Weiss and Rick Golz, tasked with trying without much success to capture the bruiser with a  pair of  inadequate trout nets. 

Rick reports Charlie "fought the beast for 20 minutes before he got it up from the bottom and we could see it was a cat. It took another five minutes to get it to the dock, where Christina and I tried to get both ends of the fish into two small trout nets without success before I finally picked it up by the gills and Charlie had the biggest cat he'd ever caught.

"The pinched barb on a tiny hook was barely in its mouth when I took it out." 

Charlie briefly thought about making his catch into a whole lot of sandwiches, but then freed the beast to bite another day.

By the way, the qualifying minimum length for a Colorado Master Angler channel cat is 30 inches.

Photos by Rick Golz