lhousesoccer

Burtess (and BillM). Skip the amber rum, and as BillM suggested, go straight for the dark stuff. Black, in fact. Black Rum. So good. Gosling's is my favourite, especially if mixed as a Dark 'n Stormy using good Bermuda Stone Ginger Beer. Dark ‘n’ Stormy 2 ounces Gosling’s Black Seal black rum About 4 ounces Gosling’s Stormy Ginger Beer (or other ginger beer) Lime slice, for garnish. Fill a highball glass with ice and add the ginger beer. Top with the black rum, so it layers real nice on top, and garnish with the lime slice. I prefer mine with 4-5 dashes of angostura bitters on top as well, but that's optional.

Out of curiosity, I'd like to take an informal poll regarding the FIRST video I posted above. Is anybody getting a copyright violation message when they try to play it? I've had a couple friends tell me that when they try to play the video on YouTube, this message appears: This video contains content from The Harry Fox Agency, Inc. (HFA) and EMI, one or more of whom have blocked it in your country on copyright grounds. However, I have no problem viewing it myself in YouTube. I don't understand why one user would be blocked while another isn't. Has anyone here tried to view it and been blocked?

It was actually a commercial filmed for Pepsi, so it's totally staged, but made to look like a real hidden camera video. Gordon wasn't even driving for most of the stunts. Still funny though. http://www.slashgear.com/nascars-jeff-gordon-pranks-a-poor-unsuspecting-car-salesman-13273728/ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/14/jeff-gordon-prank-video-pepsi-max-test-drive_n_2876259.html

Wow - that's some dedication! I love steelheading too, so I know how you feel. I would LOVE to fish some west coast steelies some day. Awesome post!

It was a genetic mutation of the brook trout. Just like some wolves are black and some are grey. The genetic mutation that cause these "brook trout" to appear without spots and that bright red colouration stayed and was perpetuated by natural reproduction between individuals possessing that same genetic trait in the local populations, until they began to decline, and humans intervened to try and "save" them. The remaining populations today have gone through a severe genetic bottleneck, being founded from a very small original population when the recovery program was started through hatchery breeding. They have almost no genetic variability, which is a large threat to the population in terms of the ability to reproduce in the wild, grow, and survive. Adding some new genetic material from brook trout won't dilute what makes the Aurora Trout what it is. There's alot of work that's gone into this, and I seriously doubt it's going to be abandoned.

Oh, thanks Moosebunk. I'll get right on that. I still have a good left knee I can take out. I just want to be creative with the way I do it. In all seriousness, some of the photos you've posted of your amazing trips (like the Tree River trip) here are what I'm trying to aspire to. I need to learn my own camera better. I also want to pick up some bigger SDHC cards so I can shoot more HD video on trips and not run out of space. Some of the video in my newest one you'll notice is kinda crappy - that's from someone else's point-and-shoot, but I couldn't take any more on my own camera because I was out of room. Maybe time for a GoPro .... So, is it expensive to do a trip to the Tree?

Awesome - have a great trip Bill. The run has been a bit funky this year. Water levels have been lower than normal, and the bite is off. There's still fish in the river, but they have been pretty stingy. The centerpin guys seem to be doing the best, since they can cover more water and get better drifts in the slots way out in the middle out of reach of us normal fly guys. Switch rod guys are doing pretty good too.

Misfish ... thanks alot. That video from 2006 with the Evanescence song was my first attempt at making a photo/video movie, and I think it's still my favourite, at least the opening sequence where I slo-mo'ed my buddies steelie jumping like crazy. These are fun to make, but it's definitely time consuming, because I take all the photos from everyone's cameras from the trip, and any video segments shot and try to sift through them into something that makes sense and is fun to watch. I always think it's really only going to be fun for those of us who were there. I never really think anyone else who's just watching will want to sit through an endless roll of someone else's fish. But, I make them and post them anyways. After I render the final video, I use a converter program that makes an actual DVD that can be played on any normal DVD player, and everyone on the trip gets a copy to cherish forever.

Djeep - thanks. I used the Movie Maker tool in Google Earth, but it's only available if you have the Pro version of the software. Instructions on how to make them are here: http://support.google.com/earth/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=176684

Mike ... "The Club" is a house that's owned by a members-only fishing club. The house is on the Little Salmon River in Mexico, NY. Nicely equipped - bedrooms, beds, full kitchen and cookware, living room, TV, big table for spreading out gear to get ready for a day's fishing. A guy from work has been a member of the club for about 10 years. He books "the club" for 3 days every December and a group of us go as his guests. It's alot of fun. We do a little fishing on the Little Salmon at the club but the water has to be just right to have steelhead up there. 99% of our fishing, we head to Altmar and fish the upper and lower fly zones on the big river.

So, Dan. How did it go? I saw your original post too late. You were actually leaving the day we were coming back from our own Caribbean Cruise vacation, so I didn't see your post until a couple days after you had already left for Coconut Bay. My wife, 5 year old son, and I went to Coconut Bay in January 2010 for 1 week. We had a great time! I packed only my 8 wt fly rod and a box of streamers, and I fished inside and outside of the rock pile break walls right in front of the resort. I had no luck on the flies, and I started talking to one of the locals one day at the bar about fishing and he said I had to use live bait. The next day, he flags me down and hands me a small bag of frozen squid strips and a single hook! Those guys are just awesome. I tied on the hook, threaded a squid on, stripped out a pile of line, and managed to chuck it out with a decent cast. The fish were ALL OVER my bait. Problem was, with my 8-wt fly rod, I couldn't drive that big thick hook home. I had barracuda (and I was wading!!!) and snook on a number of times. There was a good school of snook in the eel grass between the beach and the furthest breakwall every evening before dark, but I just could not hook up. They were all over that squid. Finally, I wading out armpit deep to the left (north) of the further northern breakwall, and laid the longest cast I could way out into the surf and just let that squid lay on the bottom. After about 2 minutes, something picked it up and starting moving out to sea. I tightened down, lifting high and sunk the hook home and I was on. The fish took me well into the backing, then I gained, then it stripped me again big time, and I was truly afraid, for the first time ever, of being completely spooled. I finally managed to turn it and get all my line back. By this time, about 50 people from the resort were watching me do battle, and cheering me on from the boardwalk. I had backed up closer to the beach to about waist deep water, and got the fish in pretty close to me, but I still couldn't see it well. Then, it turned and came at me and swam by me in about 3 feet of water - it was a freakin' stingray, man. About 3 feet across. I got out of the water and up on the beach so fast! I kept fighting it and I managed to drag it into about 4-incehs of water and it was flailing around. I yelled at one guy to grab my boga out of my tackle bag, and two local guys from the resort came running down with a club. I'm pretty sure they were going to bash it in and take it to eat. Neither the resort works or the guy with my Boga made it to me before the stingray finally snapped my 17-lb fluro and rocketed off. It was awesome. One thing is for sure, next time I go (we're planning on going back maybe next winter), I will have a 4-piece med-heavy travel rod and my baitcaster with 30-40 braid. And I will rule those breakwalls! Unfortunately, my wife was off somewhere else in the resort with our son when all this was going on, and so I never got any photos of the epic battle. Below are some general photos my wife took of my fishing the breakwalls that week though. I'm sure you'll recognize the setting. Hopefully you guys found some fish around them and were better equipped than me. Let me know!

Don't let the "vtbass" thing fool ya! I fish for anything that swims! You want to see my bowfin video? Lol.

Ok, back up and running. No idea what happened before. They just disappeared.

OK, this is weird. The embedded vidoes were showing when I hit PREVIEW POST, but they didn't show up in the actual post.

Hey Everyone - I busted up my knee (sprained MCL, I think) playing hockey the other day, which has given me time to finally sit at the computer and go through a pile of photos. I've been putting off assembling a video/photo slideshow set to music that I always do after our trips. Here's the newest one I just finished. I uploaded it in HD, so hopefully you have a good high speed connection if you want to watch it. I also embedded the other two I have made in the past, if you want to waste some more time! If you want to waste more time, here are a couple others I made a few years back.

Thanks Ron and everyone else. I'm not sure I'd buy the "let's try it here before doing it there" argument. That's the sort of experiment you do on marginal fisheries where there's not much at stake, and wait and see what happens before replicating it on your best fisheries. In this case, 17 and 18 have most of the better fisheries overall. The Advisory Council thing makes sense, but why is there no council for 16? With Simcoe in the middle of it, you'd think they have one! If that link you sent, Ron, is a complete list of councils, 15 doesn't have one either, which includes the Muskokas, the Haliburtons and Algonquin!

Hey everyone - I know a thread got locked on this topic a while back. I'm not looking to start a big argument here, I'm just looking for some info. The bass season will open a week earlier in FMZ's 17, 18 and 20, with the reasoning and justification given as earlier springs, warmer waters, faster bass growth, and earlier spawning, which I agree with and can understand. I was poking around the MNR's website looking for a document that discussed or summarized the decision making process, and pros and cons that went into this decision, because I was hoping to find a reason why FMZ's 16 and 19 were left out. I could maybe see 16 as not being included because the northern part of 16 includes Georgian Bay and Huron, which probably stay colder. Simcoe, however, is also in 16, and I think you could say the same temperature changes have occurred there as elsewhere in southern Ontario. But why leave out 19, which is mostly Erie and St. Clair? I can't imagine they are any different than Lake Ontario or central and eastern Ontario in terms of temperature changes. I just was hoping to find something written on the MNR site that explained the decision making, but I can't find it. Does anyone know?

Crib docks hold more fish

Yes, usually we have an even number. Occasionally, we'll be one or two non-boaters short, and then what we do is when only boaters remain in the hat, the first one to come out of the boaters hat is the boater and the next one is the non-boater. This is all done the night before, so no one shows up with a boat but can't fish out of it.

My bass club has recently doubled in size, due to absorbing bunch of members from another club that was falling apart. Our club tournament format is random partner draw for each event. It was easy with just a few guys - literally names in two hats - Hat 1 Boaters, Hat 2 Non-Boaters. It will be a little more complicated this year with more members, and some rule changes, like we're trying to avoid the same two guys getting drawn together multiple times, and if we have odd numbers and a boater ends up fishing alone, no boater will be required to do this more than once per season when possible. Anyways, I know I've heard about or seen computer programs that will help with the random draw format, but I can't seem to find any with the operative word (freeware). Anyone have one that works well that can be shared?

.

.

.

Fishing or Hockey? As a Canadian, the correct answer is BOTH!