Thought I better hit the river in case whats left of the hurricane blows out the river like it did the gas prices so I went for a few hours last night after work. I fished a big hole below where one of the low head dams used to be before they were taken out. Right away I caught a pretty nice channelcat and then two drums that looked like twins, each about two pounds . Then things were slow for about an hour and about four am I caught three shovelhead and lost another in the next hour. All the shovelheads were right off the bank like they were cruising the rockbar looking for food.

Get Out!

The Natural World. That's a phrase I've always looked at slightly askance. Everything outdoors labeled and tucked away as something seperate, a place you go into. Somewhere else. When I was a child I would be gone, exploring my grandfathers farm and woods all day, sailing toy boats on the pond, building stick forts. Nowadays for much of America, fear keeps our children in sight at all times. We take them TO THE PARK, instead of just saying be back by suppertime. But for millions of Americans the reality is that they might spend days at a time where their feet never leave pavement and then only cutting across the grass instead of taking the sidewalk. The Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health ( http://jech.bmj.com pretty interesting site BTW ) published a 2009 study which found that the closer you live to nature and "the Natural World" the better your chances of being healthy. The study looked at 345,143 Dutch people's medical records. (No idea why 345,143 but hey that's a huge sample group) The records were then compared with how much green space was located within 1 kilometer and 3 kilometers of a person's postal code. The results concluded that if you lived within within 1 kilometer of a park or other wooded area you suffered less anxiety and depression than those who lived farther away. Just being within three kilometers didn't seem to help much BTW. And according to the journal Environmental Science & Technology five minutes, YEP FIVE MINUTES, spent outdoors doing anything from walking to fishing will improve your mental health. Their website is http://pubs.acs.org/journal/esthag, go there and click on the online news sometime to see the stuff you cannot find anywhere else. Take the mad genius Edward Abbey's advice... " Run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to your body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards." Turn off the d%#n TV. The next time your sitting at lunch and the topic of conversation is a TV show and you are a main participant in that conversation take that a warning sign. A serious sign as much as high blood pressure or a heart arrhythmia that something is terribly wrong. Just think if you took that same amount of time and learned just one thing about the real world around you. In a year would you understand the world around you more, could you tell a sassafras tree from an oak or will you have just seen every episode of NCIS? Which is most likely? I love creeks. I've spent an inordinate time around them, fishing the larger ones, scouting the surrounding hillsides for ginseng, or goldenseal, or mushrooms, checking out rockbars for fossils, the list goes on and on. And what have I learned from creeks? One shocking fact is that nobody goes anywhere around them anymore. And I mean nobody. I'll lace up the boots, throw a peanut butter sandwich and a couple bottles of water in my daypack and spend all day exploring one and never see another person. Right there just over your fence, down at the end of the field, just over the hill, lays another country, your local creek. Your more likely to go to some tropical island than here, and your not alone, I never ever see anyone. But I do see things. Small everyday miracles, crawfish crawling across the bottom, a doe slipping down for a drink, the twisted artistry of sycamore roots. And yes Ive been bitten by bugs, I've gotten sweaty, Ive been caught out in storms and soaked to the skin and froze. You know why? Because I was alive and doing something. You dont have any of that happen to you while your watching TV because YOUR NOT DOING ANYTHING! My theory is your not really alive watching Dancing with the Kardashians. Instead you have just set aside time you dont want to live bringing you that much closer to death. "Well she lived to be 80." No, there was an eighty year period between her death and birth, she lived hardly any at all... Mel Brooks oddly enough has one of the best quotes I've ever heard on the subject: "Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you're not alive."

A big fish but that was favorite rod...

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. I was night fishing the GMR when I hooked this monster buffalo on a crankbait. I dunno if it hit the crankbait or not, I felt a thump and set the hook and she was off to the races, about as hard a fighting fish as I've ever had on. But when I finally landed her she was hooked in the cheek outside the mouth. I do know I've caught bigger shovelhead and bigger carp that didn't fight any better. Alot of that may have been hooking the fish back in a shallow bay at night, she was a freight train heading out of there to deeper water. I tightened the drag almost to the breaking point to try and stop her the rod bending in a horseshoe. Line kept creaming off the reel and I ended up pulling out my wallet and wading the the bay and following the fish downstream before finally landing her. About a half hour later I set up on a snag and the rod exploded! I'd also caught a 40 inch shovelhead on this rod a couple weeks ago besides having just fished with it hard on a hundred or so trips, I'll miss it. I've got a replacement guarantee, now if I can just find the #@% receipt...

A nice shovelhead

Im guessing around 18 or 20lbs. It looks bigger because I set it beside an ultralite to give it scale for the picture. I caught it on a lipless crankbait about four in the morning off the end of a rockbar in the great miami. Had another big fish on. Was reeling in slowly when the line just went screaming out the other way. Couldn't turn it for a minute or two but when it finally settled down it felt about the same size as this one. Then BLOOP just pulled off and was gone. I also caught a small sauger that was barely bigger than bait sized and a channelcat about two pounds, all on the lipless crankbait.

Jaws

Every morning Id set out before dawn to try and catch sharks. I'd asked around and done a bit of reading online and the story was that off the beach here in july the game was either flounder or sharks. Well a twenty inch flounder was considered a big one and the idea of catching them just didn't excite me so I opted for sharks. I learned right away the hard way that although my tackle made the small sharks fun it was woefully inadequate for the monsters that swam in the mouth of johnston creek at the beach's end. I caught a small one and was in the middle of unhooking it when the clicker on the other rod took off screaming. I set the hook hard and nothing happened line just kept screaming off the reel. Finally the fish turned but only when the spool was showing thru the little of my remaining line. I got the feeling the fish just turned of it's own accord rather than anything I did. The whole time I had it on I had the rod bent right to the point that I felt any more tension and either the rod or the 20 lb line was going to break. After a couple minutes the fish just simply began swimming away. Down to just a few feet of line left I applied even more pressure trying desperately to turn the fish and Snap! the line broke. It was a very very big fish, big enough to make me vow to never swim in low light or out too deep around here. I did manage to catch quite a few small sharks in the one foot to three foot range and briefly have another big one on. Next year I'll be back with some real tackle to put one my size up on the beach...

Turtle Tracks

Every morning while heading out to fish at Hunting Island I'd run into or tag along with the volunteers who walk the beach looking for sea turtle tracks.Loggerhead turtles born on Hunting Island will return to this beach to lay their own eggs. Female Loggerhead turtles begin to drag their huge bodies up onto the beach. This usually occurs at night or in the early morning. Once a female has found her desired nesting spot, she will dig a hole using her back flippers. She will lay about 100 - 160 eggs into the hole and when done, she will cover the hole with sand, again using her back flippers. She then will return to the ocean and will not return until her next nesting season. The huge turtles would make tracks in the packed sand of low tide that I would never leave a track in. In the week I was there I found three sets of tracks where a turtle had hauled out to make a nest, two within a couple hundred yards of our tent. The volunteers then find the nest and stake it out to prevent people from disturbing it and cover the nest with a mesh that lets the baby turtles out but keeps animals from digging out the nest.

Hunting Island State Park, South Carolina

hunting island - slideshows