Valentine's Day all February long

This has been one sweetheart of a month! Although I had the biggest scare of my guiding career a couple of days ago.

First, the bad part - I had a long-time customer (9 years) and her Dad out fishing for their first of three days scheduled. There was nothing unusual or different about the day, and there had not been any fronts recently to have affected the fish. It should have just been another average February day of fishing. Not so. I don't like to brag (well, I do but it just sounded good) but it is extremely rare for me to go fishing and not catch some fish ... or at least have several bites, even if we don't get them into the boat. But this day was going to be one for the record books! Now first you must know that this customer comes almost every year; she always books 3 days; she usually has just one off day; she always catches fish ... usually big ones. We got on the water around 7am and fished all day. When I say all day I mean until it was dark:30! We did not boat a fish ... in fact, we only had one bite ... ONE BITE!!!!! I was devastated, but she seemed to just take it in stride with teasing me all day. "Dick, where's the fish???" she would say.


I thought I would never get to sleep that night, and then I woke up at 1:30am and couldn't get back to sleep. I finally came to the conclusion that this was God's way of keeping me humble. So that morning I had them meet me earlier - at 6am and we went to a different location where I had caught fish a couple of weeks ago. It was a bit of a drive, hopefully it would be worth it.

Well, it was. I no longer got two shiners in the water and started to hook up another one when we heard a splash that sounded like someone had thrown the port-a-potty overboard! That was the beginning of a "chamber of commerce" day. She and her Dad missed quite a few fish, but they boated a lot of them, too. No fish that day was less than 4 pounds, I kid you not. I had redeemed myself!!!

The next, and last, day we went to the same location and it was an instant replay of the day before. Big fish ... BIG FISH! Again, nothing smaller than around 4 pounds. Like the old saying goes ... a picture is worth a thousand words, so I'll shut up and let the pictures below speak for themselves.

Other than that one day, fishing this February has been like these pictures all month. Now that this "Sweetheart" month is over hopefully my wife's Irish eyes will be smiling on me for the month of March because about half of all the days are booked already.

I hope the rest of you have had as good a month as I have, minus the one humbling day. Although, almost every fisherman and woman that I know needs to be humbled once in a while, if for no other reason than to keep the fish tales within reason. I know mine are now ... and I try to always back them up with pictures!