How many of you out there love the outdoors? Love new adventures? Me too! Now how many of you unfortunately have to still pay the bills? Yep, same here. I am the same weekend (and some weekdays when I am, cough cough, not entirely well) warrior family man that most everyone else is. This means that I try to maximize my time and my dollars as best I can.
This blog is about sharing the lessons that I have learned through my own adventures and learnings. What works, what didn’t, where or how I learned it, lessons learned the hard way and so on. Hopefully this will help some of you with some of the learning curves that I had to deal with, along with also helping me to solidify my knowledge by sharing with all of you.
My latest passion (and the first focus of this blog) has been fishing lake michigan targeting salmon and trout. Last year was my first full season out on the big lake and it was a blast! Keep that in mind, a lot of what you will see here – I am only 1 year in, and being a weekend warrior that is on a budget, I am not going to necessarily be showing you the same things as all the ‘pros’. Does their stuff work – absolutely, but it would or could also require thousands of dollars of initial investment to buy all new equipment, re-outfit the boat, etc. I choose a different path, one that allows me to slowly upgrade gear when I can, but still have a ton of fun and manage to put a few fish in the boat!
Yes I do have my own boat – an 18ft Alumacraft that my kids named ‘Two Fishes’. My boys were with me, which they usually are, and we had our first double – EVER on the big lake. And as my younger son was recording he kept saying ‘Two Fishes’, and the name stuck. Most of the video is unfortunately of the boat floor – but perhaps at some point I can get that clip posted.
In all fairness, at the time of filming (the above mentioned clip) my camera man was 7 and he gave it his all on trying to get good video, with a cell phone. Given the circumstances, he did great, just probably not a lot of ‘youtube’ quality. But, like fishing on Lake Michigan, we are going to keep at this filming thing as well and I am sure we will eventually get there.
We also fish inland lakes in Wisconsin, which I will post about as well. Generally this is when the whole family (all 5 of us) want to go fishing, or the weather is too windy for us to make it out on Lake Michigan (Safety first!). When it is all of us, we do generally manage to put fish in the boat, but it isn’t always (or ever) ‘hard core’ fishing.
In the end, it is really only about passing along the lessons learned to enable others to enjoy these great traditions. I mean, look at these smiles!
