Mountaineer Chronicles

We are a little more than half way through the year. Here is my update of how I've done on my goals so far. Fishing Goals: Catch a fish in every month of the year  Unfulfilled -- cold temps in Jan, Feb, and March put a damper on this.  April - July I've done well though. REVISED goal is to fish at least once in each of the remaining months. In WV, catch one new species of fish (northern pike, hybrid striper, tiger musky), and/or a species I haven't caught in a few years at least (flathead catfish, musky, freshwater drum, eel, or yellow perch). Currently unfulfilled Catch a 15"+ smallmouth bass on a fly FULFILLED -  Big smallmouth on the fly I have also caught two 18+" smallmouth bass this summer on conventional tackle Big smallmouth in the summer on conventional tackle Catch a trout over 17" on a fly Currently unfulfilled Float a new stretch of water FULFILLED x 3. Floated 2 new sections of the Cheat River. Floated

Well, we are 2 months into the new year, and I've yet to land a fish. My goal to catch a fish in every month of the year will go unfulfilled. Perhaps for this year, I'll have to modify that goal to be that I want to go fishing in every month of the year. Winter fishing is always tough, and for me, the best bets are either trout or walleye. I'm not an ice fisherman, so I need open water, which has been tough to find this year so far. Even the Mon was mostly iced up during mid-late January, which is pretty rare. Many trout streams were locked up tight. I missed my best opportunity in early January before the super deep freeze set in. I finally got out on the final day of January when some slightly warmer temperatures allowed some of the ice on the Mon to retreat just far enough that I was able to wet a line one evening to try for a walleye below the Morgantown locks. With water temperatures hovering just above the freezing mark, I knew most fish would be deep and lethargi

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

Well it's mid-January. When I leave for work in the morning, its dark. When I get home from work its dark. This is the time of year when cabin fever can set in. Big time. Here in WV, the winters certainly aren't cold enough to preclude all outdoor recreation, but the conditions certainly aren't optimal. Given my limited time to "do" outdoorsy stuff because of other commitments, limited finances, and limited vacation time, I've been opting to save a lot of my excursions for when weather conditions are more optimal. Sometimes regardless of the weather, a hike through the snow can be fun! That gives me lots of indoor time this time of year. Traditional flyfishing wisdom says I should be tying flies to stock up for the upcoming spring hatches. I do tie some of my own flies, but I'm not good enough or efficient enough to tie all of what I need. Maybe I need to just get back at the tying bench and rekindle my desire to pump out some flies. A few asso

Well its been quite a while since my last post, but that is mainly because I've been using as much spare time as possible to put a few deer in the freezer. Frustration and bad luck has been the theme of my hunting season for most of the year. I am participating in the Morgantown urban archery season, which started in early September. The purpose of this season is mainly population control, so each hunter is required to take a doe before harvesting a buck. I wholeheartedly agree that this is a necessary and useful regulation for this hunt, but even though I persevered and put in plenty of stand time, I was unable to harvest a doe. I missed out on a few early opportunities to take a doe in October, but otherwise I just was not seeing many, if any, deer within range. The major kick in the pants came the second week of November when I had to watch as this guy fed within 10 yards of me for about 10 minutes. I was in the tree just above watching as the trailcam snapped this picture, an

For those not familiar, in September of 2009, an invasive, toxic algae bloom occurred that killed 99% of all fish in my local smallmouth and musky creek: Dunkard Creek. The saltwater algae was only able to thrive because of the excessively high conductivity and chlorides being discharged from the Blacksville #2 mine (and possibly other sources). Since then, Consol, the mine operator, was fined heavily by the WVDEP and USEPA, and was also required as part of the settlement to build a multi-million dollar treatment system to ensure future water quality protection.   Its been about 3 years now since the fish kill, and knowing that the toxic conditions were not long-lived, even though they were quite bad, I was expecting that many fish were starting to repopulate naturally from the unaffected tributaries. Evan Fedorko and I had heard reports of the bass and musky fishery returning to Dunkard from other sources, and Evan asked me if I wanted to accompany him on a evening trip. Sinc