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Secret Machines - "Now Here is Nowhere" (2004 - Reprise Records)...favorite new band this year-think Pink Floyd, with John Bon My Photographs You like photos? I love taking them. Click here, if you wanna see some of my work
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Monday, Jul. 05, 2004 - 7:19 p.m. I finally picked up the photos we took with the disposable cameras in St. Louis . They turned out ok, considering the fact the cameras are fixed focus and don�t have any manual settings on them. That said, the disposables are a letdown if you usually shoot your photos using a 35mm or digital camera. Just taking film to a developer nowadays is a drag to me. I love being able to see what I took in mere seconds after hitting the shutter. Fingers over the lens (on 4 pictures), overexposure- par for the course. I liked these three photos enough to scan the prints and post them here. Hope you like them too� The first frame is from the horse carriage ride we took down on the river walk in St. Louis. Normally, I would try to make sure that nothing distracting was located behind my subjects. But in this case, I was trying to get that big metal thing into the background:
This photo was shot from the observation windows at the top of the arch. It shows downtown St. Louis. I think that is the Jones dome on the right, where the Lambs play their home football games:
The color in the morning sky was so crisp, I knew this view of the Arch would turn out fine:
I have used up 10001378 bytes of the total allocation of 10485760 bytes of storage space on my Internet provider�s users area. I would thin out a few of the older photos (2+ years ago), but I still have 3 unused email addresses. Each of those also gives me 10,000,000+ bytes of storage space. No need to start deleting, I guess� What did I �cut too close� today? Our ability to get the Hillbilly boat out of the lake in the event of a thunderstorm. Nothing major, in other words. If you are a superhero impervious to lightning, that is. We are not. And my 30 pounds of thrust trolling motor only moves us at around 2 miles per hour. All that ads up to danger whenever a storm quickly approaches our location and we are a little too far away from the boat ramp. We knew when we left the house this morning that thunderstorms were a possibility. There were several small areas of disturbance to the west of here, but they appeared to be tracking to the south of N.P.P.Lake. They also looked to be 4 hours or so away. Even the forecast said something like that. So we took our chances. The possibility of catching tons of white bass and stripers (as we did last Friday) were enough for us to take a chance. No, we didn�t have as good of luck as we did Friday (100+ nice fish). We moved the boat to the bridge as quickly as we could (15 minutes sounds about right), only to have another boat pull into the spot before we could reach it. Fuck. We headed into the area anyway, and I made friendly small talk with the man and woman in the other boat, making sure they didn�t care if we anchored up near them to fish. They said they didn�t mind, so we did. Turns out they had been fishing the same area yesterday, and had done well too. Only thing is, they weren�t fishing for whites. They wanted channel catfish. The man said he had caught 6 fish in that spot 24 hours earlier, and each weighed over 5 pounds! The depth finder was showing so many fish on the screen, it looked like an ancient form of hieroglyphics. With a cold front approaching, both boats were all set for another great morning of fishing. Problem was, someone forgot to tell the fish. We caught exactly 2 fish- one small bluegill, and an even smaller drum perch. That, folks, was two more fish than the other boat landed. Yes, that makes no sense. Everything was set up for success. The fish were even stacked on top of each other. And we caught (almost) nothing. That is what makes fishing such a challenge to me. If you don�t adapt, what works once for you might not ever catch you fish again. We decided to try for the bluegill instead. I moved the boat into pne of our favorite coves, and we started picking up a few smaller fish on our first few casts. One problem- I started to hear distant thunder. The sky was becoming dark to the west, too. We managed to cull out 7 keeper sized �gills, and decided to head back to the boat ramp. Which was still 10 minutes away. Did I mention how fast this storm was approaching? VERY fast! By the time we were halfway there, the �distant� thunder had become visible lightning, cracking overhead over the trees on the western shoreline of the basin we were fishing in. We made it to the ramps in one (unchared) piece (after having to oar the boat off of a shallow sandbar I didn�t know was so far from the bank), and I tied the rope to a hitching post and ran to the truck. Problem was, there were another 7 boats with owners who wanted to get the Hell out too. I had Lease get inside the truck as the first sheets of rain fell, and we waited out the other boat owners (all with gas engines, so they could quickly drive their boats onto their trailers). Once all were out (and the rain had slightly slackened off), it was my turn. I backed the trailer into the water, and had Lease keep her feet on the brake pedal ( in case the clutch slipped and the boat wanted to enter the lake). I then had to manhandle the boat against the wind onto the trailer. Sounds simple, but it�s not when the wind is blowing at hurricane strength. Somehow, I managed to finally get everything lined up. I had to go knee deep into the lake to finish the job. All the while I was doing this the rain was falling in sheets and lightning was cracking too close for comfort. I drove the truck up to the parking area and loaded the tackle into the cab of the truck. Lease was concerned I was close to having a heart attack (damn these extra 30 pounds of fat!), so I pulled the truck into a parking spot and rested until my pulse rate returned to (somewhat) normal. We ate out sandwiches and waited the rain out before deciding what we would do next. Guess what? The rain was over before we finished eating. 15 minutes, tops. We were in the only vehicle still remaining in the lot. And it was only 11:30. Talk about a fast moving storm! Lease wasn�t ready to go home (and I didn't want to risk another fast moving storm with a weakened trolling motor battery), so we drove around looking for a bank fishing spot (close to the truck, btw, in case another storm moved in). The first area was gated (closed), so we headed to the lake�s spillway. It was open, but the fish cleaning station was closed there, just like the one where we put our boat into the lake. Same lame �closed for repairs� sign, too. I am willing to bet this has to do with our governor�s meddling with the downstate area�s Department of Natural Resources money. No way both stations are broken down at the same time. This has Little Big Man�s fingerprints all over it. Anyway.... I managed to catch enough nice bluegills below the spillway to make things interesting (fishing with pieces of nightcrawlers on the bottom). Even landed a decent Bigmouth Buffalo fish that must have weight around 5 pounds (small for this species, which has reached 70 or more pounds for record fish in many states). He put up a good fight, and I was barely able to get him out of the moving water on my light tackle. I released him, even thought I know many people consider them a delicacy. I am not sure how to filet these large members of the sucker family. They have a set of extra bones located in their lateral line that have to be either removed (a pain) or properly �scored� so that they dissolve when cooked. Too much work. I�ll stick with my easy-to-clean bluegill, catfish, and white bass, thank you�
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