More misc.

Saturday was actually warm out! With temps in the 60s, I ducked out of the house after breakfast for a little fishing just north of town. I started out at Fellows Lake, but the onshore breeze was throwing my line back in my face. The way the winds work on that lake and where the public access is situated, it's pretty much always like that when I decide to fish there. Unfortunately, the lake has an annual fee per boat, instead of by person and it limits your access. I have to choose between my sailboat, kayak and canoe when registering a craft for the lake. I don't want to drop $25 per boat a year for the stickers. If there was a single pay option I could move from boat to boat, it'd be a lot better and I'd actually get out on the lake more often. Plus, my kayak is as much a work of art as it is a tool and I'll be damned if I'm going to slap a big ugly yellow sticker on the thing. So I bank fish there.

After fighting the wind for about an hour and working around what ice was leftover from the warm week we had leading up to the weekend, I wandered over to Valley Water Mill Park to try my luck under more sheltered conditions. I'm glad I did, since I spent the next few hours pulling bluegill after bluegill from the lake and spring-fed creek above it. I think I caught about 12-14 fish, overall. I very nearly landed a 10-11 inch black bass and saw a very large one follow one of the perch I'd hooked. I'd have had my work cutout for me if that had taken the smaller fish, since I was using my light Tenkara fly rod all day. All fish were caught on a red fox squirrel nymph fly.

Over the weekend, both mornings, I got to bacon-test the new/old cold handle skillet from my last post. I had seasoned it up nicely through the week and it performed admirably. I love bringing old and cast aside items back from the dead.

Which brings me to this little gem. A rusted and worn generic carpenter's hatchet, found in my friend Ryan's dad's barn/garage a little over a week ago (again, see previous post).

Last night, I had first planned to rehang the head on the original handle, after sanding and cleaning everything. But the handle wasn't in good shape, feeling less than sturdy after being rehung. I drilled it back out, knocked it off and wandered around the garage a while, trying to come up with a decent solution that didn't involve a trip to the hardware store. After milling around for ten minutes, I decided to take the old handle from my Norlund axe restoration and cut it down into a new one for the carpenter's hatchet. Making something more like a cross between a tomahawk and a rigger's axe. It's now 18" overall instead of 12"-13" and I can use it like a hatchet, single-handing it, or use two hands when splitting firewood in camp. Problem solved!