Vernon County Wisconsin Driftless

At left, an image of a fairly standard hiking compass and topo map courtesy Quique251 as hosted on wikicommons. Thanks Quique251.

I'm working on the accessible water guide to Vernon County and its chalkstreams. I'm about to go blind with visual overload.

Now, I'm only including details of water where the Wisconsin DNR has stated it has evidence of natural reproduction and therefore wild fish. Amazing.

I'm fifty streams into the write-up and have another fifteen to twenty to wrap-up. It's an embarrassing richness of water holding trout.

I've been tying fat little partridge and yellow soft-hackles using Pearsall's silk and hoping they'll pass nicely for cress bugs. A touch of herl on the head makes them look tasty to me. Hopefully this does the trick.

I'm quite excited to wrap up this project here in the next several weeks and turn to other non-fiction. I'll clean-up the draft, do the typesetting and layout, and see how the project looks. I think it will work for the excursion crew making the trip this spring.

I hate to go somewhere new when I don't know the country and the waters. I passed on a trip last spring for the reason that I didn't believe I could do any good at all given my skill level and the public knowledge of local waters and conditions. There was too much uncertainty for me to believe my fishing efforts would be anything like catching efforts.

I'm not good as a "grip it and rip it" style of travel companion. Wandering Savannah for a day in August looking for "this bar" just about did it for me some years ago.

It's false spring here. I'm anxious to camp. I've a new trout car in the country on its way to Michigan for delivery. That'll make the camping and fishing access much easier in the early spring.

There are fish to catch. There's scotch whiskey to drink. There's winter deadfall to burn.

 I can almost hear the sausage cooking in the pan.

Have you aired out the tent and sleeping bag yet? Not too early to get ready.

Prost.