Mountaineer Chronicles

Here I am again, that right, its me, your local weather nerd. Hi. I couldn't miss the opportunity to create a post about spring on the first day of spring (that's today if you didn't know). It looks very spring-like today, bright sun, blue skies, but all that is from inside looking out. Venturing outside may give you the idea of warm day in late January, as the temps are still quite chilly. We are definitely going through a little cold snap. None of the high temps in the long term forecast break the 50 degree mark. The daily average high for March 20 in Morgantown is 53°F. The record high is 79°F and the record low is 15°F, so even though we are a little cooler than average, we are still well within the expected range of temps for this time of year (high temp today is about 41°F). I feel like some folks think that as soon as the calendar flips to March, that winter is over and it should at least be in the 60's everyday. That's fine, and I'm probably in the m

Chad and I took off this past Friday and Saturday in search of trout. Sure enough our trip started with a breakfast feast at the Casselman Inn before braving the cold. We even had to traverse a little leftover snow to get to Grantsville, MD on I-68. After our big breakfast, getting bundled up, and somehow managing to get into our waders with the extra bulk from breakfast and all the layers, we started fishing the Cassleman River delayed harvest area. For me it started off slow, but I finally found a pod of rainbows willing to take a very slowly presented wooly bugger. I ended up catching about 10 standard sized rainbows before my toes got numb, and I walked back to the car to warm up. Chad caught a few fish, but didn't luck into a pod of fish like I was able to find. First of the year - even if a little guy. We decided we would then warm up in the car and head to the Savage River trophy trout area below Savage Reservoir. The water here, like Cassleman, was low, clear, and c

Today, WVU baseball has their home opener. They moved gametime to 1:30 to try to beat the impending snowstorm. In honor of the their home opener, I thought I'd share this amazing catch. All I can say about this is "whoa!" Won't be long until I'm patrolling the outfield for my softball team. Hopefully I can make a couple catches about half as spectacular as this one.

On Saturday, I had to run some early morning errands, then had a few hours in the middle of the day and regardless of the weather, I wanted to get outside. At about 11:30 I got to my urban bow hunting location, with the intention of doing some shed hunting. I walked the property until about 1pm, but with no luck finding sheds. At that time I decided to head down to the locks to get a line wet for a little while. I had a glimmer of hope because it was cold, snowing, and windy--good walleye fishing time according to some, because walleye hate people apparently. But in reality I knew that walleye and sauger are dusk/dawn feeders and that I would just be practicing my casting. I fished for about a half hour, lost a white jig, and decided to tie on a chartreuse sassy shad style jig. The water wasn't super clear, so I thought a little brighter color may pay off. Well it did. On about my 5th cast with that new jig, I felt something heavy and set the hook. It felt pretty heav