Please help me welcome Slim Randles as today’s Wednesday’s Guest with a story about fishing and studying fish. I sure am glad he explained what an ichthyologist is so I didn’t have to pause here to look it up. Even though it only takes a moment or two to find something on the Internet, I too often start looking up one thing, but get caught up in finding something else interesting to check out. That happens when I am doing research for my books, too, and pretty soon I have wasted er, spent an hour learning new things. Some of which I didn’t even need to know.
Oh well.
Before reading Slim’s post, help yourself to a breakfast bar. These are raspberry bars and you can find the recipe at the Lottie+Doof website. I have lots of dewberries and blackberries, so I will try the recipe with those. Enjoy….
Marvin Pincus is not the kind of guy to let spring slip through his fingers. Oh, when he was a young man, sure. But now, with the coming of spring to the world and autumn to his life, he’ll take every chance that comes along to grab life by both hands and spur it into a run.
That’s why Marvin was down on Miller’s Pond with his latest fly rod. It wasn’t really to catch fish, at least that’s what he kept telling himself. No, Marvin was there for the sake of science. You might call him an ichthyologist, however. If he were just going fishing, you’d have to call him a fisherman. Hey, fishermen are everywhere. You can find a few lurking in any sporting goods store. But an ichthyologist? Why, that’s someone of a scientific mind who studies fish.
Now Marvin’s been kicking around some ideas on how to proceed with ichthyologizing through the cold days of late winter and the delicious early days of spring. All the time he was tying flies, he was thinking about it. He thought about it while tying the salmon streamers in January. He pondered deeply during the dreaming up of dry flies in February. He thought he’d had it worked out in early March while tying miniscule emergers, but he was wrong.
So he developed The Plan.
He’d been reading about how some of the great discoveries in history had come about quite by accident, and he thought he’d follow that particular scientific line of thinking. If he wasn’t sure what icthyological breakthrough he was looking for, he’d just go fishing and let it find him.
Besides, the trout will be starting their evening rise in just about 15 minutes.
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Home Country is now a radio program in 17 states. Have a listen at www.homecountrydemo.com/
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Slim Randles writes a nationally syndicated column, “Home Country” that is featured in 380 newspapers across the country. He is also the author of a number of books including Saddle Up: A Cowboy Guide to Writing. That title, and others, are published by LPD Press. If you enjoy his columns here, you might want to check out the book Home Country. It features some of the best of the columns he has shared with us here on the blog.