The last week or so has pretty much been a lot of nothing. When I’m not taking the kids to and from school I’ve spent my time fixing up things around the house that I couldn’t get to while we were up catching smallmouth. It doesn’t amount to much, minor repairs, grass mowing and a little bush trimming. Things that’ll make the place look better and keep Julie happy.
Those things all need to be completed here in a while so that I can get serious about my real passion in life — deer hunting.
I will be going to the camp here in a few days, though. I want to do some scouting and put up a few cameras before the season opens. We have our annual owners meeting this Saturday, too. I can’t miss that. I have a lot invested in my hunting camp so I definitely want to help make the management decisions. What’s the old saying? If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain.
My boys both run cross country. They have a meet on the morning of the first day of deer season so I’ll get a late start that morning. I’ll go to the meet so I can watch them run and then we’ll all go to the camp. I’m excited about that. It’s not often that a guy gets to combine his favorite pastime with his kids.
In between all of that I’ll be doing some fishing. We still have filming to do for the TV show. That doesn’t take too much time, however. We’re blessed with a good population of fish so it’s not like we have to fish for days on end to get enough to make a good, and honest, show for our viewers.
Getting back to deer seasn, this should be a banner year. Most years July, August and September are tough on them. It’s usually hot with not a lot to eat. But this year we didn’t have much of a summer. We had cooler temperatures and tons of rain. The vegetation stayed green so they had plenty to eat. Maybe even better — for the deer, anyway — the soybeans went in late so they’ll still be there as fall comes in.
You know, it’s funny — the weather and the seasons around our country, I mean. We just got back from our last three tournaments where the trees were turning bright colors and were real pretty. It wasn’t like it was late summer. One day I even wore insulated long underwear.
I won’t see trees turning down here at all (probably), and I won’t wear insulated long underwear until well after Thanksgiving. We pretty much mark our seasons by holidays. Fall is when it’s Halloween. Winter is when it’s Christmas.
That’s about it for right now. Next time I’m going to say something about what I think might be the future of professional tournament bass fishing, maybe tournament bass fishing in general. I’m talking about weighing the fish in our boats as soon as we catch them and then putting them back immediately. I’m a big fan.