My Life and Travels
I need to catch up on some fishing pictures.
Monday April 25
Wednesday April 27
Friday April 29
Friday May 6
Monday May 9
Thursday May 12
On two additional days the fishing was slow and when I got home I forgot to take pictures. One day I got 3 and the other day it was 2.
Here is this week’s catch. The weather was great this week. Today is the official opening for all the lowland lakes in Washington. I may try some other lakes this week.
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Friday
We had high pressure setting over the area all week. Seems that weather changes help to get trout to feed so a couple of days were slow.
Today was a beautiful day and a great day to smoke fish. I had to do two smoker’s full of trout to get it all smoked. I ended up with 5 pounds of smoked trout. I like it smoked to the point where it is really dry more like a jerky.
Before:
Afters
And of course the after pictures. More fishing next week. This retirement is tough.
I went fishing this week:
I was a little late in taking this picture.
I had a great time.
This is the last of my trout fishing for 2015. I got these at Lake Morton this morning. The large one weighed in at one pound. These are amazing fish when you consider when I was a kid the fish around here were all in 7 to 8 inch range.
This weekend we are going to see Brian in his lead role as Sweeney Todd at the Renton Civic Theatre Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Monday we will leave heading south until Thanksgiving. The first major stop will be Lake Tahoe for a weekend with Richard and Vicki and then we’ll move on toward Roswell and Carlsbad Caverns.
Stay tuned.
Retirement is Great, I have achieved another one of those Life’s triumphs.
This is the largest lowland lake trout I have ever caught. It is 15+ inches and weighs just over a pound and a half. The glass cutting board is 11 inches across. It was fun to catch but I was sure worried it might get off before I could get it in the boat.
Great day of fishing, more trout for the smoker.
Ok, I’ve added more pictures.
Tanya is moving to Poulsbo so she gave me her BBQ. My goal was to figure out how to use it to smoke the trout I have been catching. I was not able to figure out how to get smoke and be able to cook the fish at a low temperature. I solved by fish smoking challenge with a Masterbuilt Pro.
I spent Saturday putting it together and getting it seasoned. In the evening I learned to fillet trout and put they in a brine I learned about at Bradley Smoker’s website. After filleting 10 trout I started to figure out the process. One of the key elements of filleting small trout is to sharpen the knife between each fish.
By the way here is Friday catch, looks a lot like Wednesday and Thursday.
Here is the smoker getting ready to smoke fish.
75 minutes we have smoked trout.
And yes it is good.
Here is lunch:
This morning was another day of fishing. Today I did have the use of my electric motor so I didn’t get near as much exercise.
But I did cover a lot of the lake. I caught the first four in about 45 minutes (got to the lake around 8:00 a.m., I don’t wear a watch since I retired so I don’t always know what time it is) and then didn’t land the last one until after 11:00 a.m.
I caught the largest one last. The largest one weighed 3/4 of a pound and all five weighed 2.5 pounds. I hope to smoke these and Friday’s catch this weekend.
InReach tracking says I traveled 2.73 miles today on the lake and 2.89 miles yesterday.
One of my retirement goals was to start doing some lowland lakes trout fishing. Today was my first day out on Lake Wilderness. I got to the lake a little after 7:00 a.m. and had my five trout by 11:15 a.m.
They range from 8 to 12 inches.
This is an aerial view of the lake’s location.
Here is a road map view of the lake’s location.
In 1976 Dad and I built two boats for fishing and sailing. My boat has been in the garage since probably 1979 or so. We moved to Enumclaw in 1977 and Tanya was born in 1979, I don’t think I have used this boat since Tanya was born.
My boat is the yellow one sitting in the lake.
Here are a couple of pictures of truck I recently purchased and by fishing/sail boat. It has actually taken a while to get the boat cleaned and to rebuild the trailer. It needed new tires, lights and hitch coupler.
It was a good day and I’ll be out again tomorrow morning. Tanya is giving me her BBQ now that she is moving to Poulsbo and I think I have figured out how to use it to smoke trout.
Another project has been to get my 12 foot lake fishing boat back up and running/floating.
Today I put a new hitch coupler on the trailer. Dad and I built two boats in 1976 and the trailer I have for my boat was new in 1969. The coupler was in pretty tough shape so today I cut the old one off and bolted a new one on. The original was welded onto the 3 inch box channel of the trailer’s frame.
I didn’t take a before picture, this is after the old coupler was cut off and I was cutting the welds off with a hack saw. I did a lot of the cutting with a 3 inch air cutter I purchased from Harbor Freight several years ago. I think I paid about $7.00 for it.
You got to love Harbor Freight.
Here is another picture of hand cutting the old weld bead off the trailer frame.
The new coupler, it is much better condition then the old one and should keep the trailer attached to the truck. I’m looking forward returning to fishing this spring.