"Best Year Ever"

It's still five below zero outside and I'm probably watching more t.v. than a man should. In my desperate attempt to find something resembling decent on (not a lot said there about current programming choices, seeing as how there's two-hundred channels to choose from and not one that I would care to watch), I stumbled on the VH1 show "Best Year Ever", which I'm told is actually a spin-off of "Best Week Ever". It was garbage, a mindless rambling of what Hollywood considered to be the biggest and best stories of 2007. Britney Spears, O.J. Simpson, Tony and Jessica, blah, blah, blah. After ten minutes of watching it I realized I was getting dumber by the second and wisely turned it off. That's when it occurred to me that 2007 was my "Best Year Ever." You wondered where all that was going, didn't you?? But seriously, my wife completed grad school and is now officially a doctor, we had our first child, bought our first house and I was offered, and took, what I consider to be my dream job. It was also one of the, if not the best years of fishing I can remember. Whether it was smallies in the drift boat, trout in the spring creeks or big lake-run fish in the fall and winter months, 2007 was phenomenal. Hopefully 2008 will be even better.

Genesis

This blog has been created out of necessity. Maybe it's the fact that work is slow and it's currently five degrees outside. Maybe it's that I haven't felt the tug of a fish in nearly two weeks. Some people may say "so what, I haven't caught a fish in five months". To each his own. Or, simply, it's that I want to share pictures and stories of the adventures and encounters that my friends and I experience every time we go out. Sometimes it's to water that we've fished a hundred times before and we'll use the same techniques and flies and maybe even catch the same fish we've caught before. Or, if we're lucky, it's to new water. With a new fly that I tied last night at midnight after several beers. With a tinge of doubt and at the same time optimistic as ever, there's nothing like exploring new water. Cheers. Here's to those of us who, more often than not, come home with a stat line that reads something like this: fish caught = zero
fish landed = see above
fish seen = some, not sure what they were though
flies lost = hmm....my box is lighter
missed phone calls = six
missed phone calls that matter = more than likely, zero