IT'S 2013 !?

Lucky 13

The fishing off season hasn't been too far off. Other than not fishing I've been twice as busy as I am during the summer. I just haven't been paddling the yak or reeling in any monster (in my mind anyway) bass. Now that the dust (snow, and lots of it in the Northeast) has settled from the holidays I need to get off my lazy and cheesecake laden behind and get this company thing in gear.
        Focus has been the issue. I make a few steps forward then another idea comes up, I pursue it, either make it happen or abandon it, then get back on track with getting all the less fun parts of the business together. Establishing an Llc, pricing and photographing product, talking to accountants, hunting down the best sticker material (which is more elusive than you might think) and just basically building what's turning into a pretty fun/interesting/exciting company.
        The response to the small amount of product that I've put out there has been positive if not somewhat confused. "What the hell does a Mustang monster truck have to do with fishing?" Absolutely nothing. A good buddy of mine (thanks Head) put that design together. There wasn't any doubt it would be a T-shirt at some point. I'd worry about it making sense later. That's kind of how this business has been taking shape. Minimal overthinking, (or thinking at all) lots of new and creative people to work with, and a whole lot of good times.
      So here's to 2013! If you're going to launch a business do it in a down ecomomy and the most unlucky numbered year of the current century. Kind of goes back to just doing something and worrying about it making sense later doesn't it? I've got some ideas I've been working on that should be pretty interesting this year (unlike this latest blog post...Yawn). One of the goals in starting the company (other than making wheelbarrows full of cash) was to bring like minded people together. Contribute as much or as little as you want. Post on the Facebook page, send me you're hunting/fishing/whatever it is you do outdoors pics and I'll post 'em up. So please keep checking back in on thatdangthing.com, like the page on FB or if you're a real glutton for punishment follow thatdangthing on Twitter.  Thanks for reading.

Milton and the $5 lamp

It really ties the room together

So I'm on my way to my buddies fishing tournament yesterday listening to the Racer X podcast, drinking a gnarly mug of fog cutter coffee and just generally enjoying life, when I spot a sweet floor lamp at a grange hall yard sale. I've been looking for an old iron floor lamp for a while and this one looked pretty cool, from 50 feet away and 30 miles per hour. So, In keeping with yard sale etiquette, I hammer the E-brake on the "150", pitching the truck sideways into a sweet tire smoking slide and come to rest next to the curb Ace Ventura style. I hop out ready to do some serious haggling at my first yard sale of the season. I walk up to the hall giving the good morning shake to some of the old timers setting up for the day when I see Milt. I didn't remember his name at first, but after talking to him for a second and asking him if we'd met before, I remembered where I had seen him. Milt's the neighbor of my buddy, Phil, who's tournament I was heading to. And just about the coolest guy you'd ever want to meet.  With that figured out, I asked him if he was fishing the tourney today. "Nope, helping out with the sale today. But I'll be over for the barbecue later." All said with that cool, been there done that, don't really give two shits attitude that only the real Maine old timers can seem to pull off. "Nice man, hope to see you there. How much for this floor lamp over here?" I ask.
For the sake of realism I'll format this like an interview from here on out.
Milt: Five bucks.
Me: Done, Ill take it. (No haggling needed. Running into Milt and getting a sweet floor lamp was well worth five bucks.)
Milt: Can't sell it to ya yet. Not 'till eight o clock.
Me: Huh? (I check my phone. It's 7:30) Uh, why not?
Milt: The ladies won't let me. (If you know, or don't know how these things work. "The ladies" he's referring to are the old timers' wives who organize all the events. The yard sales, bean suppers etc. And you DON'T mess with them or you will get the hairy eyeball).
 Me: well I'm already running late and I probably won't get back here before you're wrapped up. Is there any way we can make this work?
Milt: I'll buy it for you and bring it to the barbecue later.
Me: Great Milt, thanks.
Milt: Uh, I don't have 5 bucks on me.
Me: I'll give you the 5 bucks. (Now we've come full circle and I'm back to not getting the lamp without waiting around for half an hour.)
Without a word Milt looks around for the "ladies". With all of them being inside, he  picks up the lamp and starts walking towards my truck across the street. So I follow him feeling like I've been dropped into the Western Maine version of the yard sale Twilight zone. At this point we're both checking over our shoulders for the "Ladies", hoping we both get away with what's turning out to be the best and hardest to purchase lamp in the Northeast. We make it to the other side of the street without incident, and proceed with the transaction.
Me: They don't mess around Huh?
Milt: You have no idea.
Not wanting to get Milt(or myself) in trouble I put the lamp in the back of the truck as craftily as I can. With the lamp in  the bed and under cover I give Milt, what, in the end, turns out to be the best 5 bucks I think I've ever spent on anything. I thank him for his trouble and tell him I hope to see him at the derby. The derby was a good time. Everyone caught fish, ate dogs and burgers and talked some serious smack. But without a doubt, the highlight of the day was buying what I now consider Milt's floor lamp. Thanks for reading.

Going barbless

After some minor surgery this guy was released back in the river

The amount of fish we catch at the river borders on the ridiculous. Sure you get the odd session when you're just scratching double digits but those are the exception rather than the rule. We started fishing plastics (tubes, crawfish, senko worms etc.) pretty heavily this year and saw our fish counts nearly double. The downside to fishing these baits versus spinners and crankbaits has been that the fish take in the bait deeper, resulting in more injuries to the fish. The smallie pictured took a tube pretty deep requiring some minor surgery with some side cutters to safely clip and remove the hook.  I started crimping the barbs on all my hooks a few sessions ago and it's definitely made the fishing more challenging. Yeah, you do lose a few more fish. triggering more than a few choice four letter words to be dropped on the river. But it does make you a better fisherman. The second you hook up you pay a whole lot more attention to line tension and the angle of the rod in relation to what the fish is doing. By nature, small mouth bass are super quick and don't need an excuse to launch 2-3'out of the water to try to shake a bait. Going barbless has added more challenge to the fishing and resulted in less injuries to the fish. Win win, right? Thanks for reading.

100 fish morning

Pumpkinseed tubes were the bait of the day

Phil with his personal best smallie 3.1lbs and 19"

I love bringing people to the river for the first time. I talk it up enough that it probably sounds like one fish story after another. After a year or so of throwing the offer out  to my good buddy, Phil, to join me for some smallmouth fishing. Everything came together last Friday. We met at 6:30 am at the downriver boat ramp, loaded the boats into one vehicle and drove the 4 miles upriver to the launch. After a few minutes of roadside tackle-rigging and unloading boats, we were off. I hooked Phil and his son Johnathan up with my "go to" spinner for the river, knowing that it usually produces a fair amount of fish. For whatever reason, it wasn't. For any other spot, the 8 or so fish we caught in the first hour would have been pretty good. Not for the river. I started going through a few different baits with limited success until I put on a pumpkinseed tube. Anyone that fishes knows when you hit on the correct bait for that particular day the fishing can jump to a whole new level. The eddy that I had been fishing, and getting skunked in for the last 15 minutes, produced 10 nice smallmouth in the following 15 minutes! I told Phil and his son what I was using and it was game on for the rest of the day! Double and triple hook ups were normal for the rest of the morning. As was a whole lot of ear to ear grins! Phil told me right after he caught the lunker pictured that this was without a doubt the best smallmouth fishing he had ever seen. For the next few hours the fish count went up so fast that Phil and his son quit counting. I was into the morning for 40 and there were times when both Phil and Johnathan were pulling them into the canoe a whole lot faster than I was. Now, numbers don't matter. The fun you have with your buds outdoors in a beautiful environment is what it's really all about. That being said the final number, and this is a conservative estimate, was around 100 fish between the 3 of us. Not bad for a morning on the river. Thanks for reading!

River smallies with the fly rod. Good times!

I got away from fly fishing for a bout a year up until a recent canoe trip. 4 days spin casting out of a canoe and you start looking for something different.I'm not complaining about fishing and never will. I'm just saying changing things up can be fun. And when you're playing these hyper and super fun fish to catch on a fly rod, well, changing things up can be a ridiculous amount of fun!

A little something for the moto heads!

Nantucket sleigh ride (Maine style)

36" TDT rulers are usually enough!

I usually don't fish expressly for Northern Pike and up until last year hadn't caught one of these eating machines. The section of the Androscoggin River that I typically fish for smallmouth is known to contain a few of these submarines in the 7lb and up range. Until this session the largest pike I had boated was 25" and about 4lbs. Both of those measurements would change by a few digits at the end of this particular session. This day on the river was about average and by average I mean ridiculous amounts of fun. Beautiful 70+ degree temps, bluebird skies, and about a dozen smallies in the previous 2 hours. I was paddling back to the boat ramp when I remembered an old timer telling me that he had seen some "decent sized pike" in a shallow weed bed a few hundred yards North of the boat ramp. Seeing as my "schedule" was somewhat open for the next couple hours I figured I'd sling a couple spinners and see what might be hiding in the weeds. It hit on the second cast. Now compared to the smallmouth that I'd been catching, hit doesn't quite describe it. It felt like I snagged onto the bumper of a truck with an inebriated driver, a horrible sense of direction and a love of doing donuts. He took line! Lots of it! My drag had been set for the 1-2 lb smallies I typically catch at the river so when this torpedo took my spinner it was like dropping the gate on a supercross main! Let's do this! After the initial hit and line strippage, I settled into what I figured would be maybe a minute or two of back and forth and a nice pike in the boat. Then he started towing me around the cove and I realized he might be a little bigger then I had originally thought. I couldn't, and didn't see him for at least ten minutes. The water in the Andro this time of year looks like chocolate milk because of all the run off from different tributaries. It doesn't really clear up much until the summer when the rains slow down and the flow drops off some. So he starts towing me around in my 13.5' kayak. At first I'm cracking up until I realize he's towing me towards a downed tree about 40' away. If there's cover nearby, fish will try to get to it and he was heading straight for a potential line snapper of a submerged maple tree. As he's pulling, I'm holding onto the fishing pole with my right hand and trying to paddle/steer the kayak away from the tree with the left. After nearly ten minutes of this his pace slowed and I was able to  get him up alongside the boat and he gave me another surprise. He surfaced then dove, and as he dove I saw my spinner hooked right in front of his tail! He was literally pulling me around! After talking to a buddy of mine after the fact, I found out that if a pike misses a bait fish or lure, they may slap at it with their tail to try and stun their prey. Knowing the sketchy hook placement, I loosened up my drag a bit more and continued to play him less aggressively, letting him take line and not hurrying him to the boat. After about 5 more minutes he seemed to tire enough for me to bring him up alongside the kayak. His tail came out of the water first with the embedded lure right at the front of it. As quickly as I could, I grabbed the tail with my left hand, avoiding the lure, dropped my pole, and yanked the biggest pike I'd seen in person up into the boat. I didn't realize just how big he was until he landed in the right hand leg well of my kayak. He took up the whole thing! I paddled the 50 yards back to the boat ramp in complete disbelief. A couple back at the ramp was nice enough to take a few pics for me. And another fisherman who had also just come in from the river asked me if I wanted to weigh him. Commenting that he looked to be in the "8lb or so range." We hooked the scale to him and were both shocked when it settled on 15 lbs even! Outweighing the largest freshwater fish I've caught to date by about 10 lbs! And at 38"(measured on an adhesive,  customizable thatdangthing.com fish ruler) it was a solid foot longer than any pike I had previously caught. It was an amazing end to another great day on the river! Oh, and I just relined my poles with 25lb test and dug out my steel leaders. You know I'm going sub hunting again! Thanks for reading!