Our Outdoors: Harnessing Hope
Our Outdoors: Harnessing HopeBy Nick SimonsonI put the final turn of my whip finish on the black thread of the small jig, and closely trimmed the hackle wound behind the silver-plated lead of the lure destined for a small tacklebox on my desk. It would be a gift for a close family friend; a young angler who lamented that he had yet to catch a trout in all of his fishing adventures, despite having a water not 10 miles from his house that each spring is loaded with hungry browns that by the dozens had fallen for the same pattern […]
Our Outdoors: Sharing Stories & Tips with New Anglers
Our Outdoors: Sharing Sotires & Tips with New AnglersBy Nick Simonson In the dreamsicle light of dusk on the backwater bay, I led a line of young anglers out onto the snow-covered water in hopes that a few willing crappies would fill the couple of hours between our afternoon of sledding and a planned pizza dinner back at the cabin. The line, however, was longer this time as my oldest son and the three kids of two of my wife’s friends joined me. Among them was my godson, Gavin, and his younger brother, Lincoln, now three years older than when […]
Our Outdoors: A Touch of Spring
Our Outdoors: A Touch of SpringBy Nick Simonson The wakeup temperature on Saturday morning was seven above. Slackjawed, I stared at the readout in the upper right corner of my watch and laughed. I thought no way was that single digit reading ever going to reach the 48 degrees promised on the far side of the curve as I stepped into the garage and wistfully looked over my puddle jumper parked in my truck’s usual spot to defrost. The dogs whined with excitement for their morning walk as I clipped the leashes to their collars and opened the man door. […]
Our Outdoors: Keep Your Hooks Sharp
Our Outdoors: Keep Your Hooks SharpBy Nick Simonson Through the magnification of the reading glasses which middle age now requires me to wear at the lure making desk, I caught sight of the hook point on the most recent in a series of streamer patterns I was tying for crappies. More accurately, it was the blunted end of what should have been a hook point. Taking the fly dressed with brightly-hued bucktail out of the vise, I held up my thumb for the scratch test, a confirmatory process where the business end of any lure leaves a slight white trail […]
Our Outdoors: It’s Electric
Our Outdoors: It’s ElectricBy Nick Simonson I recognize a strange duality in the way I approach the outdoors with technology – going low teach or high tech – and the options I’m provided for any given trip on the water allow me to indulge either side of that coin. On the ice, I was an early adopter of sonar, begging and pleading for a Vexilar FL-8 for Christmas one year and not fishing the first week of holiday break until I’d received it in my stocking, deeming the inability to see what was below to be such a handicap to […]
Our Outdoors: Help from My Friends
Our Outdoors: Help From My FriendsBy Nick Simonson A heightened wind gust flapped at the canvas of my flipover shack as my youngest son, Jackson, sat next to me sounding out the longer words in his brother’s book which I had tucked into the pocket of my ice fishing jacket and provided to him after our run of fishing had quieted down some and the in between doldrums settled in. My older son, AJ, had found a spot between my brother and my buddy helping to reel in the last flurry of perch that had rolled through as the northwest […]
Our Outdoors: A Flurry
Our Outdoors: A FlurryBy Nick Simonson You don’t hear much in the way of hymns from a congregation of alligators, which is the name for the reptiles when they’re found in a group. Likely, you don’t turn to a shrewdness of apes for advice as they’d most likely be chasing you off, especially if they are of the bigger varieties. Society has come up with a number of odd names for when animals get together, but the common ones and those seen most frequently in our neck of the woods are easy to remember: a flock of geese, a herd […]
Our Outdoors: Bringing Balance
Our Outdoors: Bringing BalanceBy Nick Simonson In college, at the local grocery store was one of those old-timey scales from the 1930s or 40s with a large dial at the top displaying weights from 0 to 300 pounds. Each time I’d step on it, I’d watch the needle zip up to the high 200s, then back down to 100, then up to 220, then back down to 180, before settling in the mid-190s where I was most of the time. It provided a fun sort of gasp-and-sigh moment before displaying my real weight and was certainly more of a process […]
Our Outdoors: Trail’s End
Our Outdoors: Trail’s EndBy Nick Simonson The whir of wings on the far side of the stand of pines caught my attention as my hardworking lab sniffed out the row’s only resident. From the sound and the urgency, I guessed it was a pheasant as we had put three hens up on the walk down the valley, before turning our backs to the wind and wandering up the hillside. While I never saw it, my mind was comfortable on this final walk of the year in presuming it was of the fairer sex that seemed to exclusively inhabit the near […]
