Thursday, February 25, 2021

Some Pictures

 

The ERJ Fig Farm. Cuttings stuck Feb 8

Applying for rebaits. Not too many wild animals will turn up their nose at half a peanut butter sandwich made on a fresh slice of white bread.

Panning for gold. Or boxing if you want to be picky about it.

I am not sure what Belladonna is cooking but I am not volunteering to be the first to try it no matter how sweetly she smiles at me.

I didn't buy this but the price made it look like a screaming deal. What do people use 18 AWG copper/steel com cable for? And what job-site did they steal it from?

This struck me as odd. Looking south, picked bean-field to the west (right side, mostly off-frame) with widely spaced sugar maple beside road. To the east of the maples the snow melted but not between the maples. The best I could guess was that the wind picked up speed beneath the maples and inhibited drift settling so the snow was not as deep to start with. Any other guesses?


Sucker fishing or, Mother Nature is a fickle lady

White suckers migrate up feeder streams and spawn when the water hits 50F. In Canada, they spawn when it is 10 Celsius. One surmises that the Canadian Whiskey in their blood stream acts as an antifreeze.

Same timeframe on all of these thumbnails, March 20-to-April 15. The red line is 50F.

Pretty neat that I can go on-line and see what the water temperatures are in my local river.  This site is not the easiest to navigate but you can use it to find a stream near you.

I want to catch a mess of White Suckers this year and pressure can them. First, I have to catch the suckers.

Three different rivers in Michigan's Lower Peninsula. The blue line is the Grand River near Lake Michigan. The black line is the River Raisin in Michigan's extreme southeast corner near Lake Erie. The green line is the Manistee River near Wellston in the northwestern, center of the Lower Peninsula.

What a crap-shoot. The good news is that I can program an alert through this site to my cellphone when the temperature goes over 9.5 degrees C!

Maybe this year.


9 comments:

  1. Regarding the snow under the trees even bare hardwoods catch a lot of the snow, particularly if it is wet and it evaporates, and also blows away if the breeze picks up, so what you see is a normal thing here in the UP. There is always less snow in the woods than there is in the open. Your idea of a peanut butter sandwich for bait is a new one for me. I'm going to have to try that. Thanks. ---ken

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    1. A good bait for those traps is those mini marshmallows. I caught several Racoons and a few Possums with it. Then I'd take them about 20 miles away to let them go.

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    2. Thanks Mike. I'll get some. ---ken

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  2. Mother Nature is not a fickle lady, she is a viscous bitch who regards you with extreme indifference. She tries to kill you from the moment you're born, because the buzzards have to eat, just like the worms do. Oh - and I doubt that the fish know the difference between 10C and 50F. (Just kidding).

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  3. The cable looks like it says CATV, which makes sense, as they do use Copper clad steel for cable TV distribution. The center conductor is steel, but coated with copper for signal purposes.

    Probably mostly obsolete these days.

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  4. I would trot line the suckers. Water temp determination is not always obvious. Most people just surface temp. The surface temp is nowhere near where the fish are, meaning it's much colder 10feet down. That being said, to figure out the spawn you check for fish regularly and compare surface temp until they show up. Catching spawning fish is pretty easy cause they are clogging up the narrow head waters. 50deg is the universal number when winter water ends. Today lake pueblo was 37.8 in the day and as soon as the sun set 36.5. About 5miles long of the inlet lake is froze. I bet less than 21 days that frozen part of the lake will be 50deg, while the deeper part of the lake will be 10deg cooler.

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    1. There is a lot of mixing in rivers and creeks. I don't think there is much stratification.

      However, there is probably much difference between the temp of the feeder creek than the larger river with the creek warming up more quickly than the river.

      Unattended lines are not legal in Michigan even when the target fish is not considered a game fish.

      9' square nets are legal but they cannot have sides or be "gill nets"

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  5. The area between the road and the trees is higher for runoff purposes? Therefore it is exposed to the wind and also does not hold the cold like a depression. My WAG.

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  6. The copper clad wire says communications right on the label. The steel lends strength to longer spans between poles and the copper carries the signal.

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