Fishing in Minnesota, and a few more photos

That's right - actual fishing.  A rare occurrence these days in my life.  I had to go to Minneapolis/ St. Paul area for business and had all morning before leaving for the next flight. My rep and I decided we'd try to get out in the morning for a few hours with a local guide.  Ken did the arranging, and he did it well!  Our guide on Lake Minnetonka was Shane Raveling.  Shane and Dean Capra have, over the years, teamed up to win just about every noteworthy tournament in the upper Midwest.  So, I knew we were in the hands of a guy who knows the lake and knows how to fish.

I just didn't realize we'd have so much fun!  Shane was a blast to fish with!  He knew the water intimately, and showed us the pattern to use to catch fish.  It has been a couple years since I actually fished for Largemouth, but it came back to me pretty quickly.  We used a technique that I believe was developed on Minnetonka - fishing a Senko on a jig head with an exposed hook in 10-15' deep weed beds.  The idea is that the fish either hit on the drop, or when you RIP the worm free from the wed and it falls back.  It took some getting used to, but I ended up boating about 9-10 largemouth over the morning.  Shane was fishing to try to locate fish and establish a pattern, which he did.  He also caught a 5 pound LM - beautiful fish for MN.  He got a few pike, too.

Great day, great fun.

 Here are the couple of pictures I took.

So - there you have it - I have NOT forgotten how to fish!!

But I'm still pretty enamored with the camera thing.  Here's a few more for your viewing pleasure

Moths, and more buterflies

This post has some very cool moth photos, as well as a few more butterflies.  The moths are, well - they're just cool.  but since I only really find them on the porch in the morning if a leave the porch light on, they aren't very artistic.  Just neat photos of cool moths. 

I think the butterfly photos have more "artistic" qualities, even though I wouldn't know an artistic quality if it bit me in the ass.  I'm having more fun with the butterflies using different lighting techniques and various focal points.  Some accidental, some on purpose.  Oh well.

I just received a new 50-300 mm zoom lens for my camera, so I expect to be posting this stuff for a long time to come.

And - I actually went fishing last week, and caught a few fish.  I WILL post that rare event!

Enjoy!

                                  This is probably my favorite moth - reminds me of a bat

It's BUG Week on Flowing Waters!

Wow - 2 posts in row!!  I'm feeling like this might be a regular thing!

This week's photos are some bugs from around the house.  I'm really sort of liking this photography thing and I think I'm going to get a 300mm zoom for the camera.  Then - watch out.  I might actually get to take some REAL pictures.

Please click on the photos below to see them full size.

As always, thanks for your comments.

Joe

A new beginning for Flowing Waters

I can't imagine anyone will actually read this, since I'm sure the folks who used to follow this mess have long since given up on it. 

The truth is, the blog started as an online fishing diary, and I rarely get to fish anymore.  Work has occupied my every waking moment and I have written nothing for over 3 months.  I haven't even been out shark tooth hunting. 

But - don't cry for me, Argentina!  I have been bird shooting in Italy, South Africa, and Argentina over the past 4 months, and will eventually post some of those adventures.

In the meantime, I have acquired, and am learning to use, a real camera.  I bought a Nikon 3100 and have had a ball learning to use it.  LEARNING is the operative word, because I have barely scratched the surface.  But, with a big butterfly bush in the yard, I have had a lot of opportunities to photograph butterflies and other buggy critters.  I will be posting them here on  a weekly basis.

Please be sure to click on the photos for larger views.

I welcome any and all feedback, especially hints on how to get better!!

Joe

More teeth - but a GOOD ONE this time!

I haven't been out fishing since FLA, so there are no fish updates. And, I've really none very little fossil hunting.  But I did get out this past Monday, and it was worth the trip.  At least for me. 

I went to our local beach with my wife.  It was a beautiful day, and the tide was perfect.  I ventured down the beach like I always do, and started finding a good number of the usual stuff pretty quickly.  Mt first good find was one of the nicer Hemiprisitis (Snaggletooth) teeth I've found.  The ones I find are usually beat up and broken - this one was petty much intact.

                                  
                                                    Hemi on the left; Mako on the right



I found a lot of Tiger shark teeth - nice sized ones for this area.  Great day so far.  Picked up a cow shark tooth - the only one of the day - and a tooth I thought was a porpoise tooth.  As I got ready to go, I dug around the base of a tree root and, voila! - my best mako ever from MD!  A really nice "blonde" colored mako.  It was a great day!

And it would get better when I got home.

                                                      Cow Shark on top

                                                          A ring of Tiger Shark teeth

                                                   


The porpoise tooth intrigued me.  I've found 4 others in the past year, and this just didn't look like the others I found.  So, I posted it on the ID section of the Fossil Forum.  What came back made the trip a REALLY good one - I had found a pretty rare fossilized tooth from a Dwarf Sperm Whale!!  It has now become my prize find from the Calvert Cliffs.

I guess its a little odd to get excited over a broken 10 million year old tooth, but I'm pretty happy with it!

Time to resuscitate this blog

3 months is an eternity to go without a blog post.  It really means you've pretty much given up on the beast.

I came close to giving up on it, but there's still something inside me that wants to keep writing, at least periodically.

So - I am going to re-dedicate myself to keeping this blog somewhat constantly updated.  No matter how worthless and mundane the nonsense that comes forth actually is.

I'll start by going back to my roots - fishing.

I just returned back from a long weekend in Captiva FL.  The plans were to split time between fishing and fossil hunting.  In keeping with my past experiences, the weather turned to shit while I there - fronts blew through, temps dropped to the mid to lower 60's, brisk north winds.  On the one good day, it was only raining.  Like, raining buckets.

So, the one day I had set aside for fishing only got cancelled.  I was going out with an old friend - Dave Gibson - and after talking the nite before, we mutually decided that, for a simple, fun day of fishing, Friday wouldn't be much fun.  We'd be battling cold temps and high winds, post-front conditions, and the bay was a little torn up from the relentless winds and rain the day before.

No problem - I'd sleep late, and spend the day looking for shells, or drinking, or something.

I went out to the beach on Friday morning to look for shells and get some exercise.  Winds howled, and I was glad I didn't go out fishing.  Then I saw a guy walking up the beach, throwing a lure into the surf.  Of course, I had to ask him if he was doing any god.  "Not from this beach", he said, "but I got snook yesterday and jacks this morning from the beach between Captiva and Sanibel.  Throwing a spoon."  Of course, my fishing subconscious kicked in, and I was off.

I always bring a 3 piece spinning rod and a very basic assortment of lures on trips like this.  Bucktail jigs, Stingray grubs, spoons, Mirrolures, swimbaits.  I grabbed the one other guy on the trip who fished and we went to the cut between the islands.

The incoming tide was pretty heavy - a good thing.  I have no idea what works here, but I have a little bit of an idea on the basics.  Everyone seemed to be using live shrimp, but I felt like throwing lures.  We watched a small (20") snook come in, then a flounder and  a catfish.  I rigged up a 1/2 oz. swimbait and started to cast.  And cast.  And cast.

2 short hits (or maybe they were just mullet that I hit with my bait on the retrieve).   I was getting pretty close to calling it a day, when I got a hit.  A SERIOUS hit.  Lure stopped dead, fish jumped and took off.  By some unfathomable stroke of good luck, I had actually looked at, and set, my drag.  It screamed but held.  Long story short - about 10 minutes later I held my biggest snook ever.  Not a giant by Jupiter Inlet standards, but I'm pretty happy with it!

Hopefully, this is the beginning of more good things to come.

There are certainly more fossil stories coming!

More teeth

By this time, anyone who actually used to read this blog for its fishing content has long since departed, so I feel less and less of a need to aplologize for the fossil content.  Still, a little voice nags me from the far reaches of my brain, reminding me that I have become useless as a fishing blogger.

Oh well - shit happens.

I made it down to the local beach last weekend to take a walk and see what  I could see.  I got there at 7:00 AM but was beaten there by one other car.  With a low tide, I would be able to walk past the cliffs and get down the beach as far as I wanted to go, but there is DEFINITELY an advantage to being there first.  Oh well. 

The day was beautiful - chilly at first, but warming quickly.  I love being outside early in the morning - it's always invigorating.  It must have been the opening of deer season for some of the zones because I could hear pretty constant shooting from the Eastern Shore -  about 8 miles away, across the Bay.  It never ceases to amaze me how far you can hear across water.

Overall, I had a pretty good morning looking for teeth.  I found:

The best cow shark tooth I've ever found

A big hemipristis (broken on one side - would have been an awesome tooth if whole.)

Some pretty nice tiger shark teeth

Bigger than average ray crushing plates


Overall - a great day to be out shark tooth hunting.  Thanks for coming along for the ride.

A fossil adventure in FLA

I had to go to FLA for a short business trip but had a half (OK - 3/4) day available for some "me time".  In every instance in my past life, that would have meant go fishing.  Well - not this time.  And, for once in my life, I made a good decision.  On Tuesday there were record lows throughout FLA, and I have NEVER had good fishing there on cold post-front days.  But the fossils don't really mind a change in conditions.  Maybe when they were killed by the Ice Age or some catastrophic event 20 million years ago, but not now.  So, it was off to the Peace River for a day of digging for fossils.

Before the trip, I did my usual research and came upon Mark Renz' Fossil Expeditions on the Peace River.  His website sold me, and a little more research on Fossil Forum confirmed that Mark was held in high esteem by all those fortunate enough to have met and dealt with him.

Well, in person, he's even better.

Mark went over the fossils we might encounter at our meeting place in Arcadia.  We did a kayak trip, where I learned that I like going downstream, but don't like coming back upstream, even in the gentle Peace River current.  We tied up near a gravel area and started digging and sifting.  There were 5 people on this trip - 2 other couples, and me.  Absolutely great people to spend a day with.

The results of the dig were somewhat along the lines of what I expected - a TON of bone material, a fair number of smaller pieces of various teeth, and lots of rock and unidentifiable "junk".  The crown jewel of the area is , of course, the giant Megalodon shark teeth.  Our group had one couple find a Meg tooth and 2 Meg tooth halves, while I found a couple of fragments of Meg teeth.  The other couple found a few pieces as well.  That' s NOT to say I didn't find anything good - I did!  My best find was a fossilized Tapir tooth, followed by some fish tooth/jaw pieces, 2 croc / gator teeth, my Meg pieces, a softshell turtle shell piece, another turtle piece, a bunch of smaller sharks teeth, a possible echinoid, and a lot of Dugong rib pieces and vertebrae material.  The river is full of Dugong pieces.  The Dugong we were finding is an extinct relative of the one found in thewaters of the Indo-Pacific, and both are / were related to the Manatee.  Every scoopful of sediment held something neat.  I absolutely loved it and can't wait to go back, and I will absolutely book Mark again for my next trip to FLA.

                                            
                                          Mark (on the right) with fellow fossil diggers

                                            Mark's faithful fossil dog (can't remember his name)

                                                               Dugong rib pieces

                                             Tapir tooth - chewing surface

                          
                                               Tapir tooth - root

                                                                      Fish teeth , jaws

                                                            Megalodon tooth fragments

                                              A pretty big, but very worn, tiger shark tooth

                                                    Assorted smallish shark teeth

                                                           A decent little Hemipristis

Some of the haul on the kayak - gives a better perspective of the size and mass of the Dugong ribs


A few words about the day and the experience:  Mark spends the day rotating among the groups digging and sifting.  He ID's all your stuff for you if you have questions (and you will!) and is a treasure trove of knowledge and information.  He's also a keen observer of the incredible natural surroundings found along the river.  We saw a small gator while kayaking in, the usual amazing assortment of birds - herons, hawks, ...  Heard a Pileated Woodpecker, and saw a Red Shouldered Hawk attack a Green Heron.  He (the hawk) failed in his attempt, by the way.  Mark is entertaining and knowledgeable without any feeling of being anything but helpful.  A great guy and guide.

However, if you think that you are going to come here and simply walk into the river and scoop out shovels-full of Meg teeth, you are delusional.  That doesn't happen anywhere.  Are there Meg teeth here?  Absolutely.  Will you find any?  Maybe.  It's much the same as hiring a fishing guide - they'll determine where to take you and what method to employ but the end result is always in question.  You WILL find fossilized material - it's everywhere.  If you want to learn and appreciate the awesome resource, and maybe find some GREAT fossils, but definitely find neat stuff - this is the best money you can spend in FLA.  I'll do it again next time I'm there, and hopefully every time after that.

Mark can be reached at http://www.fossilexpeditions.com/  or by phone at  1-239-368-3252