The problem is too many people of all kinds for me. I enjoyed this area when there were less people. I use to go there a lot when it first opened and it was trolling motor only. Not many big bass boat were there. I fish for crappie mainly and could sit in one spot all day long and wait for a big school of crappie to come in to my special spot. Not often did I find anyone else fishing in my spot. One day a guy watched me catch some fish from a distance. Also I was talking to one of the IDNR guys that were checking in people's fish. They weight and measure the fish and took notes while doing this lake survey for IDNR one summer. The next day I found this older guy fishing in the spot I had fished the day before. Maybe he already knew about it and I was fishing in his spot and didn't realize it?.
These days there are a lot of people buying the small kayaks and they are using Blue grass's Bigger Pits a lot. They have every right to be there but I prefer to fish when there are not as many people on the water. I was fishing in the heat of the day in the hot summer months and it was not as crowded for a while as most fishermen leave the water by 10 am. But the people in Kayaks are out there in the middle of the day and it's hard to troll a break line when there are other boats in the way every 100 yards. So I just put the boat in the garage for the last two years. I may fish some more this spring if the weather is nice. I'd hate to sell my boat but I may. I fish by myself and it's getting harder for me to steady myself these days. I fell out of the boat once a few years back and that got me to thinking. What if the boat blows away with the wind faster than I can swim to it and get back in. I wear a life jacket these days as my swimming days are over. So it's hard to catch the boat swimming to it with the bulky life jacket on. An the launch ramp water is not covered with as much water these days at Bluegrass Pit where I liked to fish. The county installed a new culvert under the road/dam that blocks the water from flowing from BlueGrass Pit to the North into Loon Pit to the South. The water level at Blue grass had been getting too high before they installed the new pipe. Now it's too low. They had to replace the old pipe and I guessed it was because it got plugged up. There are beavers in these waters and they will **** up any running water that they hear. So it's possible that they stuck too many pieces of wood in the culvert pipe and the country could not clear the pipe of the wood so they just replaced it with a new one. They had to dig up the road for a couple of days. Anyway, now the water level is much lower and the end of the concrete ramp is in shallower water and your trailer wheels can some times fall off the end of the concrete ramp. There is a big hole in the dirt bottom at the end of the concrete and it's more likely to fall off into that hole when the water is shallower. When the water was way up it covered the top part of the concrete ramp these past few springs. The top part of the ramp is not as steep as the bottom end and it's hard for me to get my boat off the boat trailer when the water is high. I don't have 4 wheel drive and if my back tires get in the water the algae growing on the concrete can make my tires slip and I can't get back up the ramp. I've had to be towed by another vehicle one time when that happened in the past.
I've been fishing for years and enjoy it but I'm not a die hard. I'm more of a fair weather fishermen these days. I'm not a spring chicken anymore. I never really did like fishing in the rain though. And although I've fish in cold weather and caught fish it was not really my most favorite cup of tea. I love spring time fishing when the Bradford pear trees are in bloom and the weather is sunny and calm and not too hot or cold. I still have some freezer burned fillets in my freezer that have been in there for way too long. I need to feed them to the cats that hang around the yard and get rid of them and replace them with some fresh fish fillets. I can't eat fried fish anymore since I had the open heart surgery and the heart attacks. I loved fried crappie but not I have to bake it as it's healthier for me. So I don't eat as much fish as it's a pain to bake the fish. I have a small electric oven that I can bake fish in but it's very old and the shut off contact metal is warped and rusted. I had to take it apart and clean the metal up. The metal expands when it get hotter and that moves the metal connection from the other power button and turns the oven off. When the oven cools the metal spring thing moves back to make an electrical contact and turns the oven back on again. I used this oven when I was in college about 40 years ago so it's not a spring chicken anymore. But it still is operable if you can figure out the temperature settings to use. The temperature settings and the knob that adjusts the temperature of the oven is not as accurate as it was when it was new. So now I use a digital laser thermometer to measure the temperature of the oven on the inside and adjust the control knob to get the temp that I want. I wrap the fillets in aluminum foil and add butter and lemon juice to them before wrapping them in the foil and putting them in the oven. They come out pretty good. I just have to figure out how long to cook them at the various temperature settings. I use to use a fry daddy and vegetable oil or peanut oil to fry the crappie fillets. Man this discussion is making me hungry for some crappie fillets. LOL I can smell them cooking in the oil now. My old next door neighbor had a bigger fry daddy and we use to fry up a lot more fillets at one time with his fry daddy. We would eat the fired crappie fillets on bread and add some tarter sauce to them. I could go for some smoke port butts. Smokem for about 10 to 16 hours and the meat just falls off the bones.
Now I'm getting myself back into the mood for fishing. It was about 60 deg F outside today and I cleaned the gutters on the house and then picked up a bunch of limbs that fell out of the trees into the yard. I burned one big limb that was 3ft long and about 10" in diameter that fell out of my Ash tree during the last storm. Part of it was rotten and part of it was still solid. It was heavy too. It took me a while to get it into the wheel barrow and move it to the back yard burn spot. I've been collection twigs and small limbs that fall out of the trees during the storms and adding them to my burn pile since last summer. And I have about 9 tomato steaks that I used in the garden. I stored them leaning against the brick wall on the back of the house. I found all of them with termite trails and eaten wood. So I burned them as well to kill the termites. I now need to treat the house for termites. Before this last fall I had water in my crawl space and the ground was too wet for termites around the foundation. They would drown in all that water. I never saw any evidence of them inside the crawl space. But I had the basement water proofed and the crawl space it dried now. So I knows that I need to treat the house for termites now. I've had them inside a old dog house back in 1989 when we first moved into the house. And I've seem them flying off or out of an old sassafras tree in my back yard in the spring. So I know that they are around. My neighbor had them in his door framing and had to replace the wood in his back door framing. They can do a lot of damage without you knowing that they are there until the house falls in one day. Opps. So I'm going to call terminix real soon. Its going to be 60 deg F again tomorrow. A good day to go shooting guns. Oh yea that's my new hobby. I have all these boxes of shooting supplies parked right in front of my boat in my attached garage. I have them there to make it easy to pack them into the bed of my pick up truck when I go shooting. But they get in the way of getting the boat out of the garage. So that's another reason why I don't fish as much these days. I'm going shooting instead. Love my new Walther's PPQ M2 4" Semi Automatic Pistol and my Ambush Firearms AR15 in Real Tree Camo, topped off with a EOTech EXPS3-4 sight and a G33 magnifier. All I need now is a PV14 Night Vision scope to add to the AR15 for night hunting coyotes and hogs if I can find them around here. I talked with a guy the other day who goes down to TN with a bunch of other guys to hunt wild hogs. Now that sounds like it would be fun and exciting.
Originally Posted by GeoFisher
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