Last tour of Gause?

It seems likely that Friday night Is the last time I will ever get to attempt to remove fine grain fed pork from the Spring Valley Ranch in Gause.

As part of Jeff's blast off spectacular Brian, Jeff and I took a walk around the main ranch around dusk. Our timing was somewhat poor, by the time we got there spotklights would be required.

As we walked into the pasture Jeff and brian heard squeaks, Looking intently I saw a dark shape moving since Gause is a color coded ranch I knew it was on...

The pig was closer than expected and brian turned on the light. Here is where something funny happened:

There was only one pig that I saw...Certainly more were there but the one I was looking at without lights seemed to disappear when the light came on. I looked throught the scope and couldn't see anything. I double checked, yep, lowest power... I lowered the .270 and looked with my bare eyes, I could see where it was casting a shadow but couldn't make out the actual animal.

I put the gun back up and just as I did the animal bolted and Jeff shot hurriedly. He was having the same visual problems I was.

Anyway the pig got away alive...

Brian and I took walk down to the main pighole of the north ranch around mid-night bbut it was quite....
Brian and Jeff took a look at dawn but quiet again...

Not the most auspicious way to go out but it has been fun over the last couple years.

If I am ever cursed with cattle on my property Gause has taught me that there will be no brown or black cows allowed...

Fishing Has Been Slow, exept for the other guys fishing with me

Well, steve wants to know how my fishing trip went. I actually have been fishing twice, once in the dominican and once ghetto style down on lake grapevine.

The dominican fishing trip started like we were gonna slay some beastly dorado. We set sail early saturday morning with 30 tuna fish samiches, 7 eager fishermens, assloads of Presidente beer, one haitian boat monkey, plenty of bait and gear, and one bad boy 32' center console boston whaler w/ dual 275 hp mariner 4 strokes. We went out to about twenty miles rode around for eight hours following dots on the GPS, caught one durado, and 5 tuna of various species, all of which totaled a mighty catch of about 7lbs of fish. None of which I brought in(you know giving every one else a chance to pull something in and waiting for that really good hookup).

To get to a little better story, the ghetto fishing at grapevine this last saturday night resulted in some spectacular bounty. We (some guys I worked with in the past) arrived at the mouth of a slew about an hour before dark, and rapidly set out some hooks loaded with chicken livers and stinkbait. Appropriate for the catfish we were hoping to get into. After getting settled in a couple of guys not including me decided that this would be a good time to try some artificial bait to entice the bass that might be around during the waning minutes of daylight left.

I (being fairly knowledgable about the bassery) decided that this would be a pretty good waste of time being as there was absolutely no cover nor structure present at our littl ghetto honey hole. Well, Jason had other plans, and the following is the result.

approximately 8 lbs of bass, probably the heaviest bass to be pulled out of this lake in a couple of years. Go figure.

Being as the rest of the fishing was fairly slow and the catfish that were caught were extremely un-impressive ill end this story with one final thought..........

I didnt get shut out!

Starting to get better at this hand checkering thing

I completely understand why it costs $200-300 for a decent set of hand checkered 1911 grips. It takes some serious patience to do this stuff. Ill post the rifle stock im working on after completion.

Dan cranking home a steelhead with a bright green back,  

Another nice steely that proved to be delicious with a teriaki/brown sugar glaze 

This steelhead caught by dan filled the limits but not until it put up the best fight of the day. 

We caught the first fish before dawn. 

In the words of Paul Harvey:

How I think I remember it;


I went with my wife, daughter and parents to Mackinac Island for a family day trip. We left at 5:00am and got back at 10:30pm.
Got unloaded from that excellent endeavor and grabbed what I thought I would need for my next adventure.

Dan pulled in to my folks driveway at 11:00pm. We blasted off with an icechest full of beverages and high hopes to Meet Gabe. Gabe is the fellow that is the winner of fishing guide of the month and a real strong candidate for guide of the year in my opinion. He said that there were a handful of truly 'money' spots and that if we got there early enough we should catch fish so long as the migration hadn't moved on yet. So we arranged to meet at 3:00 am in Kalamazoo.
Swung by East Lansing for Dan to get his fishing gear and drove to K-zoo we had decided to get the the meeting spot and nap rather than nap then drive. Pulled into the assigned park and meet location, put the pillows behind our heads and Dan's phone rang, Gabe wanted to know if we were on the road yet...Dan tried his best to sound half asleep and said that we weren't. Listening in the passenger seat I could tell gabe was searching for the nicest words he knew to say that we were screwing it up.
It became too funny and Dan and I started laughing and told Gabe to hurry up we were waiting for him. 20 minutes later we were headed towards a river (name omitted as per gabes request) that empties into Lake Michigan.

We put the boat in the water at 4:30am and slowly slid up river. Gabe picked out a few landmarks and we were on the spot. We pulled up to within 10-15 yards of a creek mouth and in the moonlight we could see fish splashing in the water. We threw spinnerbaits and some flies at them. They weren't hungry but could be convinced to give the bait the teeth if provoked adequately.

When a steelhead (a large migratory rainbow trout) was hooked they exploded into action shooting left and right pulling drag about like a spanish mackeral does. However if their frantic flight took them toward the boat or the tree down in the water they would jump. We had several jump three or four feet out of the water, several hookups were lost with this maneuver but not too many.

We had the first two fish in the boat before the sun was really up. The limit is three steelhead each and after Dan cranked the last one in we checked the watches. Everyone took a guess at what time they would say, most estimates were around noon...Really it was 9:05am. We started to stow the gear for the drive home and it started to rain. It was raining steadily as we pulled the boat onto boat ramp.

As we were pulling the boat out of the water I told my brother. This is what is feels It, we won....To which Dan replied this isn't winning, this is marching over land you have already conquered.

We cleaned the nine fish. I didn't have a ruler but the icechest Dan and I brought was 30 inches wide and the fish stuck out each end. Each one a solid 10 pounds of fish, several better but none that would make the 'pig' classification of 14 pounds. I took a photo of the carnage at this point to show the variation in the colors from green and silver to nearly black and silver with a bit of pink along the middle but in the pic they just looked grey.

And now you know the rest of the Story...