Welcome to Monday

Two fishing trips (one sans skunk). One river clean-up. One Youth Education Day. Oh, and working like hell. That's a pretty full week.

Back on the 22nd my chapter of Trout Unlimited celebrated Earth Day by cleaning up the banks of the Pootatuck River* in Sandy Hook, CT. It was our first stream clean-up and it really couldn't have gone better. Over twenty volunteers assembled in the rain (the first in about a month) to scour the banks for trash. The river's banks were surprisingly clean though we still managed to pull all the usual, and some unusual trash objects from the river.

The middle of the week brought a TU event on the Beaverkill after which I managed to fish a bit. I owe you a report on that one but the short story is the fish were there and I caught a few.

Saturday we had thirty students and their parents join us for our annual Youth Education Day. We spent the day with kids from our large Trout in the Classroom program tying flies, casting, doing macroinvertebrate sampling and introducing them to trout from a local hatchery. There's nothing more rewarding that teaching kids about our sport and if you ever have a chance to get involved with something like this do yourself a favor and volunteer.

Last night I rounded the week out with a trip up to the Housy for a few hours. A complete waste of time. While things at home were sunny and calm, an hour north it was windy and the fish weren't rising or responding to a streamer or even munching on a tan Caddis pupa. The big skunk. I should have fished the stream down the road. Hindsight.

Now it's back to the working like hell part and maybe a trip some evening to a local stream. Life is busy but when you've had the opportunity to do a few things that feel like good deeds, it's the good kind of busy.


* Yes, here in the East, we kept the Indian names of things (mostly). In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was a small consolation to the native populations as we took what was there's though we generally got the spelling wrong. By the early in the nineteenth century, we were done with all that pretense as Lewis and Clark "discovered" rivers out west and named them. "Hey, there's the Madison, Jefferson and Gallatin, we friggin' discovered them!" By the way, Sacagawea's camp name was Alice. That other name had too many syllables.