This year my dad took my brother and I across the state to Plum City, Wisconsin to hunt at my Uncle’s in-law’s farm. The property is edged with a woods that acts as a funnel between two larger forests, and a creek bed in the middle gives anyone hunting the slope a great view down where the deer should be. When we arrived on Friday night to survey our stands, we were surprised to find that mine had been crushed when the tree it was in fell over in a storm. You sometimes hear about things like that, but it definitely seems more likely to happen to you when your last name is Swagel.

So on opening morning I got to my stand early, bumping a group of five deer as I entered the woods. Perfectly silhouetted against the ambient light, I could pick out two bucks and three does, but it was way too early to shoot. Part of me was ready for this to be the only deer I would see. As it got light, I started hearing shots nearby. By 7AM, I got a text from my brother that he got a buck. This was a huge deal, as he also shares my curse of having hunted forever without taking anything with antlers.

A little while later, I heard a loud crashing noise ahead of me. Soon I realized it was another hunter, probably looking for a wounded animal. A doe then popped up and ran off. I had a shot, but it would have been a poke with my 12 gauge. An hour and a half later, I was ready to leave my stand when I spied something standing to my left… a buck! It looked like it might have saw me, but I froze in place and waited for it to go back to what it was doing. It was about 70 yards away when it went behind a tree giving me a chance to adjust my position and bring my gun up. Over the course of 10 minutes, I finally got my first taste of ‘buck fever’ as I turned into a clumsy oaf trying to get my scope keyed in to the right magnification, all the while it fogged up from my excited breathe.

I could see that it had antlers for sure and a decent body, but it never struck me as being a large deer. However, 17 years is a long time to wait, and unless I wanted to pass until 2029, it was now or never. As I squeezed the trigger, the deer collapsed instantly. It was one of the most decisive shots I had ever taken and it felt really, really good to not have that guy run off in a cloud of smoke. When I got up to the body, I couldn’t help but be slightly crestfallen that the rack was busted off on the side I couldn’t see. It was still a 4-pointer, but barely. Anyhow, beggars can’t be choosers. I am no longer chasing my first buck, and that’s all that counts!

By now, I had learned that my brother’s first buck was a massive 8-pointer. I am glad I had not seen a picture of it until after I shot my deer, otherwise it may have spoiled my moment. His buck had a 19″ spread with a symmetrical rack; my fork buck looked like it could make a nice back scratcher at best. I guess when he has his buck back from the taxidermist, I will have something to aspire to for my next deer. I am looking forward to 2013 already!

I was using a yarn fly to start out, but once it became clear that the fish surfacing were in the deep stagnant holes, I tipped my bait with a little spawn sac to give it some scent. Despite seeing plenty of kings, none of them seemed particularly interested in biting. By the time Nick and Tony arrived, I spotted maybe a dozen salmon, but only one or two that didn’t look zombified. One of the quirks of this particular spot is that even the healthiest looking salmon usually still have a rotting, white tail. It must be rough going down stream, as our other spots usually don’t have as many fish with their tails in this bad of shape.

The salmon that looked catch-able were maybe a little too aware that we were in their turf, so I never hooked up until later, when I accidentally snagged a disgusting specimen that brushed by my bait. Oftentimes even the worst looking salmon will still put up a fight, but this big girl was lethargic and seemed to just give up. Touching the tail to get the hook out was like picking up a dead body. My hand is now forever unclean.

After giving up on our first spot, we went to a different river a couple miles away. There we ran into more of the same. As far as we could see, this was a chinook-only event. That didn’t stop every other fisherman we ran into from telling us there were trout mixed in, but their fish identification prowess was suspect. The only fish I caught was a big male chinook that was fighting with another male. It was pretty cool to watch them open their jaws and gnaw on each other in battle. When they are aggressive like this, you can get reaction strikes, which is pretty much all I seem to be good for these days. The fish didn’t fight like a typical male salmon, but it still took ten minutes or so to subdue him. I’m more happy than anything that my leader held up, as I wasn’t 100% sure my knot was up to snuff. I guess I am competent after-all.

Nobody was around to take my picture, but really there was nothing to see. Once you’ve caught one fall salmon you’ve caught them all. Hopefully if I am able to get out again the cohos will be running, and unlike the drab kings, they have some color and are almost kind of beautiful in fall. What would be even nicer would be if those trout everyone thinks they are catching started showing themselves!

I get it that those wolves were in a movie, but if actual wolves are anything like that in real life, then I’m not a fan. It’s pretty clear that most dogs are nice, but there’s always that moment in your life you run across a dog that for whatever reason really seems like it wants to kill you. Now we’re talking dogs here, but scale a dog like that up to the size of a wolf and suddenly it’s easy to see that if one wanted to do something to you while you’re vulnerable in the wilderness, you are in big trouble.

An internet search is all it takes to realize that the scenario in The Grey is not likely. That was a perfect storm of a plane crashing into the heart of an isolated part of Alaska that just happened to be within the killing range of the wolves. That plus the smell of the crash victims bodies kind of whipped the whole pack into a frenzy. That’s not the situation when I go fishing for a few hours, but my fishing buddies did have a close encounter with a real live wolf just last year near the Michigan border while wading. Luckily, I wasn’t there, because I would so be that one rare case of a wolf ripping a fisherman apart for no reason.

So if you’re looking for an intense tale of wilderness survival, be sure to check out The Grey. It’s like TAKEN, only with wolves!

My biggest one was caught on a deep diving crank bait near an ancient castle. I just cast into a deep hole next to the treasure chest and submerged knight corpse and there that’s when I felt the jolt on my controller as a huge largemouth hit! After a minute and a half of hold the L-trigger and twisting the analog stick I brought the whopper in. It weighed in at 18 lbs! If it was only two pounds heavier I would have unlocked an achievement in the game!

The game is a port of the Sega Dreamcast classic Sega Bass Fishing, which also released in arcades and the Nintendo Wii. You can purchase it online through Xbox Live arcade for 800 Microsoft Points ($10). I attached a photo of my huge bass! What do you think of my pants? My wife says I need to show off my legs more. Also, I haven’t had a haircut for a long time.

Hopefully they are biting again tonight, because this is the only fishing I’ve been doing lately! Tight lines, folks!

So I haven’t wrote anything for a while, mainly because I haven’t been out in the last few weeks. It wasn’t until reading those forums that I was reinvested in writing and talking about fishing. As I scrolled down the comments on one post, the conversation quickly changed into one of ethics – all because of a photo of someone’s stringer. What happened to us as outdoorsmen that we have to defend keeping our fish?

Here’s the situation: trout fisherman can be a bit pretentious. I am a novice trout angler in every sense, but there’s something that goes along with fly-fishing where in the back of my mind I get this smarmy feeling that I’m a cut above the rest of the population with their spinning rods. It’s a false sense of superiority that I need to keep in check by doing other types of fishing in between.

So on the forum, a guy proudly posts a photo with a limit of steelhead. The dogs were unleashed. Everything of accusations of snagging to people saying he was single-handedly responsible for their below average year. The rationale is that since most of the fly-fisherman on the site average one or two fish per trip, anyone with five must be snagging. As someone who has sat there and watched Joe Schmo shore fisherman catch steelhead on spawn right in front of me while my yarn fly doesn’t get so much as a look, I beg to differ. I know my first instinct is to always assume the guys that aren’t wearing waders must be snaggers, but every so often I get a good view of just how efficient they are with spawn and reassess my place in the angling hierarchy.

So to go with the perception that fly-fishing is more pure than any other type of fishing, there is also the sense of entitlement in which people assume those fish are there only for fly-fisherman. Unfortunately, we have to play by the rules, which means we are competing for the resource with everybody else – charter fisherman, people trolling, people casting from piers, fellow fly anglers and river fishermen alike. As long as they playing by the rules, they are within their right to keep what they catch within the limit. That’s the fact. I completely agree that catch and release is important to exercise, but I also agree with anyone that says trout are delicious.

There is one factor that is kind of a wild card in this whole thing though. It seems common knowledge that salmon go upriver to reproduce and die. It would also seem that many fisherman assume the same goes for trout, when in fact they don’t die after going upriver. So in that sense it is a bigger deal to keep a trout. That doesn’t mean they all need to be tossed back. I would love if there was a way to accurately come up with a pie chart of the total number of steelhead stocked each year in Lake Michigan that survive to maturity. Then let’s divide it up into three categories: steelhead kept while trolling, steelhead that never are caught and steelhead kept by shore fisherman. I have a sneaking suspicion that the shore fisherman end up being the smallest slice.

I love fly-fishing. I love fishing with spawn. I love going out on a charter. Basically, I love catching fish, no matter how I’m doing it. I also love that fishing serves the dual purpose of being a sport activity and a means of fulfilling that primal urge to hunt and gather. If you look at it in a pragmatic sense, fish exist to be eaten, just ask any eagle or bear. I’ve kept exactly six steelhead in my four years of targeting them. That’s got to be six more than a lot of the die hard catch and release only fly-fishermen, but still a drop in the bucket of the overall population of fish. If a guy has a great day and keeps his allotted five trout, let’s take a step back and realize there is no immediate shortage of rainbow trout on this planet before we throw them under the bus. I mean, where do we go from here? Hold protests at the harbor when the charter boats come in?

Later in the week I did a tour of shore spots along the Anhapee river and Kewaunee River. The only fish I saw were carp. It wasn’t until I went to the fish viewing station that I spotted a lone salmon near the fish ladder. So once again, need rain.

Next I spent an hour fishing the harbor in Kewaunee with a spawn rig while also casting spoons. I saw salmon and browns surface, but nothing biting for me. After a while I made my way to Algoma’s harbor and cast a spoon into the surf. Charter boats were doing passes immediately in front of the break wall and fellow fisherman on the pier had a few browns and kings on their stingers. I saw some fish, but again no hits until I called it a day at noon.

It wasn’t a total loss, as I now can pretty much bet the fish are in close and are ready to go upriver once the rain cooperates. I even managed to find a scum frog lure on the dock at Krohn’s Lake in Algoma on my way home. So I got myself a parting gift.

Last, but not least, it will be of utmost importance to raise my child to appreciate the sport of fishing. When I think back to my first fishing trips with my dad, I can honestly say that I was terrible at everything. If you don’t have a little help along the way, you’ll end up being that clueless guy you see on the pier holding his pole upside down and using a Rapala with a bobber. I’ve heard my dad say he regretted starting me out with a Snoopy rod. I don’t remember too many trips with it, but one stands out. There was a little creek flowing into the bay between Howard and the Tower Drive Bridge along the highway there. Dad and I caught some bullheads and that kind of thing, but I vaguely remember hooking carp with the Snoopy pole and dad would have to take over. I mean, a carp could probably eat me at that age. That’s probably where he came to the conclusion that a Snoopy rod wasn’t the most practical way to fish.

I told myself that when I had a kid, i would skip right to a normal fishing pole, but now I’ve kind of come down with a case of ‘Snoopy rods are really cute’ syndrome. So, despite my more practical side saying they are a dumb gimmick, I don’t think I’ll be able to help myself when the time comes. I recently gave my nephew a completely impractical Power Rangers bobber, that’s how it starts! Until next time, I will be keeping an eye out for some cutesy fishing rods! Maybe they have a reel that looks like R2-D2. How perfect would that be?

I started out around 6 a.m., slowly making my way around the twisty-turny bends, fishing each deep hole and undercut area. I started getting strikes, but when I set the hook for the first time I was surprised to find a Bluegill on the other end. This would end up being a common theme for the morning, as I continued catching a dozen Bluegill throughout the first stretch. Not huge ones, but respectable, so at least it was good sport. When I finally managed to hook something big at the bottom of a deep hole, I saw a big gold flash and was psyched that I had finally hooked one of those nice Brown Trout that Tony is always catching. I played the fish out quickly and it was then that the unmistakable head of a sucker rose to the surface. I had been hornswoggled. I released the 16″ beast and continued my walk.

A few more Bluegill fooled me before I came to another promising hole. Once again I hooked a large fish, but this one quickly popped to the surface with it’s gaping sucker mouth exposed. For whatever reason, these things were highly aggressive today. I continued on, spotting large Northern Pike and even a decent sized Largemouth Bass. The hot summer must have given these fish a chance to flourish in the normally trout-centric habitat.

I had a line tangle in my reel around 8 a.m. just after I cast towards a fairly run of the mill-looking bank undercut. I was content to let my bait sit on the bottom while I tried to fix my lie without resorting to cutting it off and starting over. As I finessed the tangle, I noticed that line started pulling out from the rat’s nest I was working on. I lightly held the line to make sure there was really a fish on and when I felt it tug I knew I had something bigger than a Bluegill. I winched it in by hand almost as if I were ice fishing. Without the shock-absorbing bend of a rod, it was a very delicate battle. I had to give lots of line away to avoid the 2 lb. test snapping when it made a run. When I finally brought the fish near, it’s flash looked identical to a sucker, of which I was very familiar with by now. Dejected, I continued to pull it in until I got a closer look and saw those red spots staring back.

I remember saying out loud, “Perfect, I finally hook a Brown and of course it was only by accident.” I do talk to myself out loud when I fish alone. It’s weird. I scooped the trout and took it to the bank to snap a blog picture. I would have preferred to let him go, but the unattended bait was swallowed deep by the 14″ fish. If I was on the fence about keeping fish that day, my decision was made for me once I saw the blood streaming from her gills. She’s marinating in my fridge as we speak and will not go to waste.

So after years of somehow never catching Browns when I go fishing with Tony I finally have my day. I added one to my stringer later to make a meal, lost a couple others and threw back some Brook Trout. As the sun came up I started spooking a lot of good-sized trout, as the deadline to get back to the car was approaching so I couldn’t afford to work as slowly as was necessary to fish them. I hung up my rod and hiked it back, and when I met Tony at the car his cooler had a few Brookies in it. We decided to call it an early day at 10 a.m.

Looking back at the morning, I honestly think the only thing I did different than usual is that I went through the stream alone. Are Brown Trout more wary than Brook Trout? Possibly. Tony always seems to catch them, and he always walks by himself. I tend to use the buddy system because I’m afraid of bears. I guess I should just suck it up from now on.