Man Vs. Wild (Iowa Style)

After a couple of hours on the lake and not being able to find any fish after my hopeful crappie spot was invaded by some fellow fisherman Spencer and I went to our “backup” pond. This pond is on the north side of Pleasant Creek lake, and is near the old cemetery. Luckily, there is only a few that know where this pond is, as it requires nearly a mile hike through some eighteen inches of snow and the trail back to it is unmarked, and looks like nothing more than a deer trail.

Spencer and I decided we would try our luck fishing on this pond, and that we would bring the hatchet and matches that I almost have with me in my truck. However this soon became far more than just a casual fishing trip we decided to do our own spin on the Discovery Channel shows Man Vs. wild and Survivorman in this small Iowa woods. This show usually involves several “steps” first he gets lost, he finds shelter and food, makes a fire, and then he gets rescued. We were obviously going to ignore the first and last steps as our truck somewhere to the south of where we were.

We found the pond quickly enough and I soon had put a couple of holes in the ice near the deepest parts of the pond where I had hoped the fish we were lying. Spencer searched for a spot near the pond that we could make into a shelter. He soon found a spot on the north bank of the pond to where we could build a shelter. There were three trees and we used those as the supports to hold up the roof. We used extremely small green saplings to tie some larger willow saplings to these support trees and from this we layered several more willow roof saplings to make the main skeleton of the shelter’s roof. We then cut some pine tree branches to cover the willow trees. At this point we had made an impressive shelter, I thought, and was similar looking to several of the shelters we had seen on these shows. Spencer then made a fire from some dry kindling that I had gathered while he was completing laying down the pine branches. He focused on starting the fire and I focused on catching us some fresh fish. However the fishing was also horrible on this lake and I only caught one little bluegill. Spencer and I wanting to be like the heroes of our favorite television show figured that we should try cooking our fish over the fire. We did so and the fish tasted quite interesting to say the least after some more fishing without luck we made our way back to the truck and headed home both agreeing that we would leave the winter surviving to the experts.

Midwinter Icefishing Slump

I went fishing last weekend on both Saturday and Sunday afternoon.  The ice is near 2 feet thick, so it quickly becomes important to make sure that this is where you want the hole dug.  Saturday I ended up getting into some nice crappies on a brushpile in the north creek channel of Pleasant Creek lake. I was using a mid-sized Swedish pimple tipped with some wax worms that I had found in the grain solo of my grandpa’s farm (this is a great way to get hundreds of worms in a matter of minutes, just ask a farmer if he has any spilled grain anywhere on the farm and that’s where the wax worms will be).  However, I was limited with time as the last twilight of the sun’s light soon left the lake and the bitter cold started biting through my boots and gloves. I was surprised with the decent luck because of midwinter’s ability to shut down the fishing.

I decided that I would try this spot the next day.  On Sunday afternoon Spencer and I went to the north end of the lake to go back to the same brush pile and hopefully if I had patterned these fish correctly they would be there again.  However, I found some other fisherman there when we pulled up to the snow covered lot where I had parked before.  Doing the sportsman like thing I had decided that we would fish somewhere else and not crowd the fisherman that had got up early to get the worm (and the fish).  We spent near two hours unsuccessfully looking for a similar “setup” of both structure, depth (similar position as the creek channel, and of course time of day was already similar. 

The midwinter hunt for fish is just so difficult and countless articles have been written about it.  I have noticed this year that bass and crappies migrate non-stop during this time of the hard-water season on lakes and something I have never observed before but the fish migrate on ponds only about a half acre large.  This is making even pond fishing difficult, which is usually my backup to when the large lakes are too difficult to pattern. We tried the “backup” pond on the north end of the Pleasant Creek park and again couldn’t even find the fish on the half-acre pond. 

I’ll be heading out quicker next weekend to the brush pile to claim the spot and maybe the crappies will be there again. Anyways…good luck, and good fishing.

College Football

As I progress through my junior year at “Cougar” school my college search is beginning. After I come home from weightlifting I always find several letters from colleges wanted me to come visit their campus, ultimately these poor attempts of recruiting me are thrown in the trash. It seems these colleges don’t provide would-be students with the information that we desire to hear.

I know that I would like to be involved with the military or in a government intelligence agency, and then retire as a farmer back in my home state of corn- covered Iowa. I also really want to play college football at a Division 1 or 2 school.

With these lists of demands I begin my college search, but I have to do several steps to accomplish getting into the college that I want. I’ve recently talked to my counselor and to my football coach about playing ball in college. Luckily, I have the “required” height, the basic speed, and the talent to be a recruitable student athlete. The next steps that I need to continue with in becoming recruited and being offered a scholarship is to go to college camps this summer at the schools that I would like to go to. I also need to compile a highlight film either of this year’s play or more desirably of next year’s season play.

I need to continue working hard during the off-season and to lead my teammates who are not involved right now with a winter sport to work hard. Also, I need to continue to lead my team next season and summer. I’ve also been told by my coach to work twice as hard, as he told me I’d being play both ways next year, on offense and defense. I know this opportunity of more playing time will show to scouts my abilities, but I need to work now to be able to do this.

Cougar Team Coming Together

After winter break our weightlifting numbers have swollen, to include up to 50- 60 guys, which is tremendous. As we have nearly the same number in winter sports, next season we will surely continue the tradition of having a large football team on the field and on our sideline. This not only gives a better chance of having all around more talent, but also an intimidation factor to other teams. This is a truth as every time an opposing team steps out of the tunnel each of us instinctively sizes them up, both at the size of their physical bearing and the size of the team (before games I always hear murmurs of the sizes of the opponent’s team and I’m also guilty of doing some sizing up of my own).

Now that I’ve lead you to the shadow of my topic, I just wanted to mention how pleased I am to see the team coming together this early. Anyways from this I would easily guarantee that at least 90% of the team is involved in some form of rigorous exercises on a daily basis, which is again outstanding.

We continue to weight lift every day but Wednesdays, and we have further implemented more lifts into our “regular” routine, which we so fondly call “supersets” or “killers”. These supersets not only include just our basic lifts, but auxiliary lifts for the few dozen seconds we aren’t lifting, thus insuring no rest time besides when we spot our weightlifting partners. This is strength and endurance to its fundamentals, exactly what our minds and bodies will require on the field this season.

The team (weightlifters largely) also can feel this vibe that our team is coming together and that we have successfully got the mass of the team practicing for next year’s season. The team knows that this is the year of the Cougars, the year we will head to the dome and be a better team than any other in the state. We have large amounts of talent, the mindset of hard work (weightlifting faithfully everyday), large amounts of players, and experienced coaches, the recipe for a winning season and for a run to the dome. Go Cougs! 231 days to kickoff at Linn-Mar.

Crappies!

My cousin and I were right when we had predicted that those crappies would be still large in number and heavier in size in our grandpa’s pond (this was described more in depth in the post “Tracks in the Snow”). It didn’t take long at all for us to know we were on them as soon as I dropped the vexilar I saw several bleeps near the bottom and also suspended at about 7 feet of water. As soon as I dropped the waxworm loaded shrimpo down through the hole several more bleeps showed up and not a second later I was pulling up a healthy crappie out of its watery home.

After about an hour my cousin and I had nearly 50 of these crappies caught, we deemed it sportsmanlike though to keep only a half dozen of these crappies that we had caught, the smallest being 9 inches or so. It seems funny to think now that we got tired of catching all those crappies, and after that blitzkrieg like hour we soon went to another one of my grandpa’s pasture ponds to pursue some bluegills and some bass.

There is a huge number of crappies in this pond and because of the pond’s small size (approximately half an acre) I want to create a good population of good sized crappies. I think this will be a hard task for me to accomplish as to keep the fish relatively large I need to drastically cut the population, but by doing this I would be cutting the chances for success when I go fishing. As crappie fishing in ponds in southern Iowa is notoriously hard, unless the barometer is right or a front is coming through, maybe one day out of the week the crappies will bite, but when they do it is a feeding frenzy. There is one exception to this crappie rule though and that is if the population of crappies is overpopulated, or at the least very high. That’s why it will be difficult for my cousin and me to maintain a good population and yet keep that population at a large size. I’ll try to fish this pond again before ice-out and then see what happens to the crappies in the spring.

Coyote Hunt

Over Christmas break, to say the least, conditions were not ideal for furbearing ventures. Most of the snow melted off and thus rendering coyote hunting extremely difficult. However the weather did produce approximately half an inch of snow on the Saturday after the Christmas holiday. It was not ideal but yet it was sufficient enough to give the hounds enough powder to trail a track.

We loaded up the dogs and our hunting party of about 20 guys and were able to hit a track northeast of New Sharon. With more than a dozen dogs in pursuit they were able to catch a coyote twice on the ground and one other was led into the sights of a hunter. We ended up near Montezuma, but the dogs and hunters were unable to catch the last coyote as both the dogs and hunters tired and the little snow there was soon was disappearing yet again.

Beyond that day’s catch of three coyotes, we didn’t really have any success any other day hunting. However, I was able to finally sight in my new rifle, which is a Mossberg .243 with a 9 power scope. I had several shots at a coyote, but I missed them all or at least it had little effect to the coyote’s movement. I hope for another good snow and that I might be able to get a kill with my new rifle as I’m used to it now after the practice I had with it.