Big Fed.gov on Fishing Boats

Michelle Malkin has started an investigation of the intrusion of the Federal government into commercial fishing operations, it's in the Ammoland News this week.  She starts in "the northeast" but much of what she talks about rings true down here in central Florida.

The story starts with, well, what you'd think if you've watched federal overreach into everything else in the country for the last 20 years.

The plague on the commercial fishing industry isn't “overfishing,” as environmental extremists and government officials claim. The real threats to Northeastern groundfishermen are self-perpetuating bureaucrats, armed with outdated junk science, who've manufactured a crisis that endangers a way of life older than the colonies themselves.

How often have you heard that the seas are overfished and that they're virtually deserts empty of life?  As Michelle says, generations of schoolchildren were indoctrinated with the belief that stocks of fish have been depleted by greedy commercial fishermen, and there actually was a period when foreign factory fishing vessels overfished places around the US.  But that was in the 60s and 70s; when the domestic fishing industry regained control of our waters, stocks rebounded.  Could it be an effort to shift control to big governments instead of people whose lives and livelihoods depend on managing the resource?  How could anyone, any group, know the populations of fishes everywhere?  Nobody is capable of counting them all, so it obviously has to be by sampling and estimates based on how many fish are collected. 

Meghan Lapp, a lifelong fisherwoman and conservation biologist, points out that government surveyors use a “net that's not the right size for the vessel,” which produces “a stock assessment that shows artificially low numbers. The fishing does not match what the fishermen see on the water.”

Instead of fixing the science, top-down bureaucrats have cracked down on groundfishermen who fail to comply with impossible and unreasonable rules and regulations. The observer program, which was intended to provide biological data and research, was expanded administratively (not by Congress) to create “At Sea Monitors” who act solely as enforcement agents.

Yes, Big Brother dispatches a fleet of spies to track and ticket commercial fishing families while they work. And the biggest slap in the face? New England groundfishermen have to pay for it. A study done by the National Marine Fisheries Service estimates the program costs about $710 per day or $2.64 million per year.

Does she mean they literally put agents on board every fishing boat to monitor their compliance?  As she says, yes, NOAA calls the program their At Sea Monitors.

“Before we sail, we have to do declarations on our boat tracks, which is a vessel monitoring system,” Tom Jr. explained. “We have to declare what areas we're going to be fishing in. We also have to submit a sector-trip start hail and operator's permit number. … (Then) you have to submit a daily task report, what area you were in, and all the species that you caught.”

On top of all that, an at-sea observer boards the Williams' boats and bunks in tight quarters with the crew, looking over their shoulders at every turn. Over the years, the expanding reach of regulators has become overbearing and, as brother Aaron described it, “humiliating.”

I don't know the commercial fishing world here in Florida, but I assume it's under the same rules as these folks are.  As I'm sure the northeast states do, we have state waters out to 3 nautical miles from shore in the Atlantic or 9 miles from shore in the Gulf of Mexico, with and federal waters beyond that.  It's not unusual for state and Federal rules to be different, putting us in the awkward position of legally taking a fish in Federal waters that would be illegal if caught in state waters and vice versa.  The state and the feds tend to mimic each other, but it does happen.  The fishing rules and regulations are so complex and frequently changing that the only reasonable way to keep up with them is to carry a summary with you at all times, and update that summary.  I keep an app on my phone with the rules, updated whenever I open it. 

For example, in this part of the state, we're told that a well known fish sought as a delicacy, the red snapper, is in trouble.  At the moment, it's legal to take two per day in state waters, but not legal at all in Federal waters, and the species is almost exclusively caught in Federal waters (in this part of Florida).  It's legal and believable that an angler could stop at a shallow reef in state waters, catch a legal red snapper, then go farther offshore and now have an illegal fish.  I've heard stories from several guys that they had gone to a deep reef in search of another species, but couldn't get a bait past the "protected" red snapper.  Once caught, they have to be released, but like most deepwater species, their swim bladder inflates as they're being brought to the surface causing what's referred to as barotrauma and making a safe release more difficult.   You can't simply just let them over the side.

Michelle Malkin onboard a groundfishing boat.  Photo from Michelle Malkin Investigates and Conservative Review.

“Fishing Wars: Drowning in Regulations” debuts on CRTV.com’s “Michelle Malkin Investigates” program this week. To find out more about Michelle Malkin and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Home Tonight

We got home close to 9:30 tonight.  There have been several people asking about how I've been recovering, so this is to provide that information feedback loop.

This really has been about the worse thing I been through, though

The obvious closing the feedback loop,  is the gall bladder so let me go down that road.  The  surgeon told me my gall bladder was seriously messed up.  Showing serious damage and tissue death.  It looked like the gallbladder might have died off on its own (gone necrotic).  Before doing removal of bladder they did a radioactive imaging test.  That test may have showed it to be the worst one he's seen.  There was no pancreatitis, though, , just a bad gall bladder.

The week was somewhat of an ordeal with that

Different Kind of Fun Show

Not just a gun show, but a gun and fishing show. 

Today, Mrs. Graybeard and I drove an hour south to Ft. Pierce for the Florida Sportsman Expo held outdoors at the county fairgrounds.  Florida Sportsman is a magazine dedicated to the state that covers fishing, hunting, shooting, camping, diving and basically everything you'd want to do in outdoors sports.  I know a lot of you north of us on the east coast are suffering through snowmageddon so I don't mean to sound silly, but it was cold today by our standards.  It made it up to about 60, but there was a NW wind at about 20 steady and gusting to 35 or so.  Yeah, I know, many of you think of that as car washing weather. 

At the fishing expo there were various boats on display, kayaks, and other man-powered, skinny water fishing boats, plus custom rods, lots of reels, tackle, and lures like DOA Lures and USB Lures.  Pretty much everything you'd need to outfit a fishing addiction.  The fishing show, though, was in an equestrian events building that offered no protection from the wind.  With sun blocked out by the building, the wind was rather difficult to bear, and I had good rain jacket/windbreaker on.  Before someone says it, I know the term "dress in layers", but it isn't part of my everyday life.  Plus, I expected the expo to be indoors, based on the photos at the FS Expo website. 

Running alongside the fishing expo was a gun show.  The gun show wasn't particularly good.  The venue was two small side buildings, and there was hardly anything to see.  The most interesting thing I saw was that a Mossberg 715T, their AR-lookalike .22LR semiauto was going for less than a plain old Ruger 10/22 with the basic wood stock. 

So we drove about 130 miles, spent $12 to get in, didn't see a thing worth buying and spent three hours to find that out. The worst part was that I managed to get my two wheel drive Exploder stuck in mud looking for a parking spot.  A nice guy with a 4WD Ram gave me a tow out back to firmer ground. 

The Fairgrounds looking more or less south.  Fishing was in the big building in the back behind the red circle. The gun show was in two of the three smaller, squat buildings to the right and in front of the circle. 

Projects 'R Us

A busy weekend of projects, again.  One of them was a project for someone else that I can't talk about except to say that it took up 4 or 5 hours. 

The next big project was to continue finishing the guitar kit. I think I'm up to 8 coats of polyurethane on the front of the guitar's body.  But it seems we can't have triumph without a little tragedy.  Two little  tragedies.  First, I went to sand the back so I can apply more coats and ended up taking off stain, which meant I had to re-stain the back.  Second, after several polyurethane coats on the neck, I set it down and turned my back on it for one freaking second and the wind knocked my finishing box over, breaking a chunk off the headstock.  Nothing that can't be fixed - by cutting, sanding and starting the finish over.  One step forward, two steps back.

Got out for a few hours of fishing, or boat ride.  It has been really warm here; morning lows are about 15 degrees above average, like most of the winter.  Nice for riding around in an open boat, not as nice for cleaning up everything afterward at noon.   

Then there's this little collection of things that need attention.  Not this weekend, though.

You're not seeing things.  The three in front are the 80% lowers from the "3 fer sale" at Tactical Machining; the two in back are "0% lowers": just forgings.  They were all handy for this family photo while doing some straightening up in the shop. 

Nice Weekend

It was a thoroughly nice weekend here.  Weather was on the cool side, but drop-dead gorgeous.  Clear blue skies, breezy, (too breezy for a small boat) high for the day in mid-60s yesterday and almost 70 today.  It was about 40 when I got up yesterday, and that's the coolest morning of the year so far.  We ordinarily have a few days every winter in the low-30s if not upper 20s.  Not this year. 

Yesterday was the Orlando Hamcation, which we go to every year.  Didn't get much, but I ran into a guy selling a Canon 35 film camera with a lens I'm interested in, and Speedlite flash.  I got the outfit for $25; the "nifty fifty" (50mm f1.8) lenses are going on eBay for $80-ish.  I don't know if the camera is any good, since it needs a special lithium battery, but the Speedlite didn't power up.  I don't have much interest in going down that film road again so I don't know if I'll even get a battery to try it.  Aside from that, a few little odds and ends; LR44 batteries, some heat shrink tubing.  In other words, not much.    

Today, I got to spend the day in the shop.  I built the new butt/handle for the replacement fishing rod, taking the chance to use the new lathe to make it a bit easier on myself.   That linked article has a picture of the rod butt and while it's hard to see it in that pic, the handle is three pieces of EVA foam with the reel seat in the middle.  The rod is tapering over its entire length, but the bottom end is about 1/2" in diameter, while the top of the handle is around 0.475.  The EVA comes with a 1/4" bore in it, and pushing a half inch rod blank through that hole is neither easy, pleasant, or a good thing to do.  Most guys enlarge the hole with a round wood rasp (file); I enlarge the holes on the lathe with appropriate undersized drill bits.  The reel seat is mounted on top of a plastic foam that's very delicate, and ends up getting a nearly half inch hole down it's length until what's left is a tube about 4" long and maybe 1/16" thick.  While the EVA will stretch a bit, this stuff snaps if you look at it funny.  I broke the one on the original rod badly and made the effort to make sure this one survived the machining, which it did.  By now, the epoxy is set and it's a permanent bond. 

Finally, I got to stain the guitar body.  I got Honey Amber and Red TransTint dyes from Luthier's Mercantile, and while you can use those as alcohol based or water based, I went with water.  I'm not sure I'm done with it  The red came out looking too orange-y, (and to make matters worse, the colors in this picture match pretty poorly). 

The flame maple on this kit is pretty good.  My thought was that if the kit was good as a guitar body and the wood was pretty, I can always put a different set of pickups in it.  The back and neck of this kit are mahogany, so I'm going to stain it a reddish brown.  You can see the blue painters tape I masked around the sides with in this picture. 

Any day I get to spend in the shop making things is a good day. 

Yet Another Project

Remember my broken fishing rod?  MHX agreed to replace the broken blank and the new one arrived today.  I just ordered all the stuff that it takes to build the replacement rod.  I'm still out the cost of all those parts, but the worst loss is the time it's going to take to redo it.   Hey, it should go quicker, right?  Learning curve and all.  Plus, a chunk of the time last go 'round was building the fixtures to do the work. I still have those.

The last one, just before epoxy coating.

Work on the guitar body resumes this weekend, too.  Interspersed with lots of other things.

About That MHX Spinning Rod I Built

I wrote about a spinning rod I was building a few weeks ago and finished it by Thanksgiving weekend.  With the weather we tend to have in December, it was going to take a while before I could get out to try it, and finally did so this weekend.

I wish I thought to keep exact numbers, but I think it lasted less than 15 minutes.  When we got the boat out yesterday, checking that rod out was one of my reasons for going (as if I need a reason to go fishing).  We were fishing in rocky water about 15' deep.  On one cast, I thought I felt a soft pickup, and struck hard.  Very quickly, the line stopped moving.  This is either a snag on bottom, or the fish diving under a rock.  I leaned back hard on the rod, and within a few seconds, the rod snapped, taking the 10 pound monofilament with it.  There are really no feelings I can compare to that.  It's one thing to loose a fish: that happens.  Imagine the finality of not only loosing the fish but the rod you just spent every spare hour for a month working on.  It's quite a jolt. 

The rod wasn't overloaded.  It's rated for 8-15 pound line, and I was fishing 10 pound.  MHX has a warranty, so I've contacted them to start the process of getting it replaced.  Nothing will replace the rest of the parts on the rod or the time spent building it, so pardon me if I'm not feeling really good about MHX at this point. 

That chartreuse thread I used never photographed well, but that was a really pretty rod.  

I'm Told the Frogs Say... (And an Oily Ramble)

I'm told frogs say, "time's fun when you're having flies." 

It has been a bit of a whirlwind couple of days since my last post, but the tree is in place, the shopping is essentially completed, we're completely ready for the holiday break, and even got the boat out this morning for a few hours of fishing (you will note I said "fishing", not "catching"; or as the French say, cherchez le poissons).  It was around 45 degrees or so when we put the boat in the water, but warmed up to about 65 by the time we came back in.  Winds were almost dead calm; the sky was cloudless and a fantastic shade of blue. 

So while burning some fuel in the outboard, it gave me some time to think about the price of oil.  Naturally, regular gas at under $2.50/gallon, as I paid yesterday, makes it a lot easier to live with a boat than when it was around $4/gallon, but what is going on with oil?  Is this going to suddenly reverse?  Is it going lower than $50?  Brent Crude oil from Stockcharts.com:

Since July, crude oil has been falling in price from just under $100/bbl down to a close of $61.85 on Friday.  For most of us, the falling oil prices are a Good Thing; we spend less on running our cars, and boats, along with the more important things like heating houses.  It should show up in reduced prices for things that get shipped across country (short version: everything).  The falling prices, though are having negative effects around the country - especially in the new US oil production fields.  Perhaps more importantly, it's pinching the other oil producing nations.  The BBC presented this graph of the break even oil price for a sample of countries.   The graph omits Russia, which is stated elsewhere to need $100/bbl to break even.

(I hasten to add there are a few quoted oil prices: Brent crude is one price, light sweet crude is another and so on.  I used the Brent crude price to make these two charts consistent with each other.  The exact price to the penny isn't as important as the trend).

While it's impossible for us to truly know what's going on, there has been reporting that Russia is driving this effort along with their proxies in the Mideast.   Others have said it's being led mainly by Saudi Arabia.  Either way, the theory goes that the goal is to get America out of the oil market, so that they can get prices back up.  This idea is supported by some of the things Russia is doing where they can to shut down energy production.  With oil at close to half of what Russia and Saudia Arabia need, that's quite the game of chicken.  "Let's you and me bleed ourselves to death, and I bet I'll stay in the game longer than you do". 

I think there can be a bigger game going on here, though.  The principal power in OPEC is the Saudis.  The Saudis have no use for the Iranians and are frankly terrified of a nuclear Iran.  You can bet your butt that if Iran goes nuclear, the Saudis will go nuclear as well.  For a country that nominally hates Israel, they've quietly agreed to allow Israel to over fly Saudi territory if needed to attack Iran ("the enemy of my enemy is my friend" in action?).  They also want Assad out of Syria and Russia is propping up both Iran and Syria.  I think it's entirely possible that Saudi Arabia could be playing the game to get Putin out of the area, and try to collapse the governments of both Iran and Syria.  Russia's economy is already showing signs of trouble.  If they collapse Putin himself, get him ousted by ballot, by revolt or worse, I think the Kingdom would view that as a good thing.  I also can't imagine the Saudis would be too upset if they found a price for oil that shut down American shale oil production. 

So I think the falling price of oil could well be the result of the Saudis pressing it down all by themselves. I can see Russia and Saudi Arabia working together to hurt us, but I think the Saudis have a stronger interest in collapsing the Iranian government and if it hurts Russia, well, that's just a bonus. 

Busy Day...

There's a wise old saying I encountered in test engineering back in the '80s: there is nothing more frustrating for a technician than to realize the problem he has been troubleshooting is in the equipment he's troubleshooting with and not what he's working on.  I have a drawer full of those Tee shirts, and I think I got another one today. 

That was a few hours out of the day. I have a 12V 35AH battery, a sealed AGM lead acid, that I keep around for general backup use.  My plan is to use it with my small solar panel to keep it charged, but mostly it just sits around.  Friday night I decided it was time to put it on a charger to keep it topped off.  To my surprise, it timed out the little charger I was using at 300 minutes (5 hours) without saying it was full.  That made me think it needed to be cycled down and back up, so on Saturday I hooked it up to a load: an AC inverter and 100W bulb.  100 W at 12V is about a 8 1/3 amps, so with inefficiencies and all, it should discharge for 3 to 4 hours.  The inverter cut off in no more than 2 hours.  This time the smart charger said it was done after putting in just a few hundred mA, which was way too little.  So today I thought I'd give it a load which I could measure current through and rigged up a combination of some stuff (including a spool of wire which drew an amp itself) and drew 2 amps for three hours.  6AH - should put a dent in the battery, but not deplete it.  To my surprise, it was measuring 11.3 V at that point, just about stone dead.  Again, back on the little charger and it put about 3 AH into the battery and said it was done - but a voltmeter read 11.88 V, which is about 30% charged.  This time I switched over to a better charger, and this one said 30% charged and started working on it.

So I've probably been troubleshooting the charger (one of these under a different brand name).  Most likely.  The behavior of the battery was still suspicious, but sometimes you need to discharge them deeply and recharge.  Since I was believing the little charger until the last bit of troubleshooting, maybe that's the only problem.  

While waiting for the battery to discharge or charge, I was working on another little project, a new spinning rod.  This was prompted by noticing the one I had been using was rusting in places (a saltwater rod should never rust).  I get the regular catalogs from Mudhole (no affiliation, just a customer, YMMV, best if used before...), and picked up an MHX graphite blank, along with the parts to make it to my taste.  I finished all the wrapping and trim (probably...) and now just have the epoxy finish to apply.

The blank is black, and I decided to finish it primarily in a bright neon green, like MHX's logo, but with a little light turquoise trim.  Here it is on my little rod winding setup.  The unusual thing about this rod (for me) is that I found this 3M sheet abalone to do some fancy looking trim work with.  So I got a couple of pieces of this stuff in a color called "angel wing teal" and tried it for the first time.  This is a rod with an EVA foam handle that leaves a few inches of bare blank between the grip and an end cap I'll probably stick in my gut to fight fish.  It got a piece of this, as did the area where I ordinarily put a decorative thread wrap.  It's nice looking stuff.  Fragile, and cracks easily, but I understand there are actually thin layers of abalone shell in there, and I don't think that's flexible.

Add in some time wasted looking at football on the tube and BAM! back to work in a few hours.  Thankfully, I get a short week this week. 

Rust Never Sleeps*

Since about Memorial Day weekend, my time has been split between getting the new shop going and tending to a problem with my aluminum boat.  The boat is stored in the garage, and so it lives an easy life.  Not exposed to rain, or other environmental problems; when we take it out, we wash it down, run the outboard for 10 minutes worth of freshwater flush, followed by renewing oil or grease layers and generally doing our best to keep it in top shape.  During the work putting in the shop, we rolled a toolbox out of its normal position to behind the boat, and there it stayed for a couple of months. When I moved that toolbox back, I was stunned to find this hole in the back of the boat, on the left in this picture.  The visible metal on the right is just a scuffed area where the buckle of the strap (just visible on the right edge) rubbed against it one day. 

You're looking forward from behind the boat near the right (starboard) side.  This is the transom, the vertical wall that's the back of the boat; the outboard pushes on this and so it has to be strong.  It undoubtedly gets the strongest forces the boat experiences.  

There's no mark of impact; no evidence anything hit the boat; if anything, the exposed metal looks dissolved.  Since this is just inches away from that strap on the right (used in strapping the boat to the trailer for towing), and is large (about 3/4" long) I absolutely would have noticed it if it had been there when we last had the boat out.  No, this formed while the boat was sitting in the air conditioned garage. 

So my free time in the last month or so has been spent trying to understand what caused it, and if it's fixable.  Some boat mechanics I've been able to talk with say it's galvanic corrosion caused by saltwater getting trapped in there, between the plywood core and the thin aluminum skin.  (I do have a picture or two that appears to show salt crystals on the wood).  The dissimilar materials set up a corrosion process.  Experts tell me the only way to fix this is to tear the boat down to bare metal and replace all the wood.  Rebuild it.  There is some chance that this is electrolysis; that some current flows in the boat's metal hull from a damaged wire or something, and this current is what caused the corrosion.  Last weekend, I put a kill switch in line with the battery, so that the battery will be completely disconnected when we're not on the water.  That will help a lot if it's electrolysis, but have no effect if it's galvanic corrosion simply from some saltwater getting trapped in there. 

There are other holes in the boat.  These are smaller, on the order of 1/8" or less diameter.  There are some on the left (port) side of the transom and along the on bow both sides.  Only a couple on each side.  Funny thing is they appear to be on the level of the bottom of the plywood deck of the boat.  The experts I spoke with say that when a pinhole appears in the aluminum skin, the other side of the skin looks like a large corroded crater, many times larger in diameter.  

Today, I sanded the holes down and especially along the edges of the bigger ones, using polymer/silicone wheels with SiC abrasive embedded in them.  Once the edges of all of the holes were clean, I degreased everything with denatured alcohol, and then sealed them all with epoxy putty.  We'll have to wait until tomorrow to see how well it bonded and some time (probably on the water) to see how well it holds up.

My gut feeling is that it isn't electrolysis, it's just galvanic corrosion.  That means the boat is scrap - or soon will be.  Holes will continue to appear, and enlarge.  We can repeat today's work over and over, chasing new holes whenever they form, but eventually the boat corrodes away.  The shame is that this is only a 9 year old boat - I've only had it 2 1/2.   

* with apologies to Neil Young: it's not rust, it's aluminum oxide.  The other word for aluminum oxide is sapphire, but Sapphire Never Sleeps just doesn't have the right connotation.

Life in Florida - What They Don't Tell You

22 year old Jessica Vaughn was tubing in the intracoastal waterway close to downtown Ft. Lauderdale and was bitten by bull shark.  This screen cap of the area in Bing Maps shows just how densely populated the area is (the blue dot marks where she was pulled from the water and ambulance called):

One of her group claimed to know the shark to be a Bull shark by sight.  I wouldn't doubt it.  First, Bulls are known to go into water much fresher than that spot, which is around three miles from Port Everglades inlet and the ocean.  Second, Bulls are known to be aggressive biters and known to be behind many inshore shark attacks.  Third, that wound absolutely looks like the bite pattern of a Bull! A set of pictures on the Daily Mail show the underside of her calf where each and every tooth mark is visible.   Thankfully, surgeons were able to repair her wounds and she was discharged from the hospital. 

As a science nerd who spent a lot time in the water, I read all the research available on shark attacks as part of year long "open research" class I was allowed to take in my last year of high school.  Based on that I'd say this attack has the look of a "hit and run" type of attack.  The shark took a bite to decide if she tasted like food and then spit her out.  Possibly mistaken identity: the shark thought her leg was a fish or some other natural prey, took a bite and thought, "not food".  If that shark had really wanted to feed, I suspect it could have taken her lower leg off.  There's an old observation among shark researchers that if a large shark is successful in an attack, you get a missing person report, not a shark bite.  At an estimated four feet long, this one wasn't big enough to make her disappear, but she's still lucky. 

I live within about half mile of the Indian River lagoon and Bull sharks are regulars in the lagoon.  The water is much less tidal and salty than where this attack took place in Ft. Lauderdale, but that Wikipedia article shows Bull sharks go into completely fresh water.  You need to know that most shark attacks happen in relatively shallow water (because most people stay in shallow water) and in dim light.  Either at night, dawn or dusk, or in dark or murky water, like this incident.  Wading at daybreak casting the saltwater flats while trailing a stringer of fish is begging to be hit by a shark.  If you go wading, put the fish in a cooler or plastic tub or something that keeps them from making sounds or putting out a scent trail in the water. 

I saw a commercial that featured some folks surfing at night.  That's more dangerous than daytime surfing anywhere that I know of.  Swimming at night isn't any better.  Yeah, I know, people do it all the time. 

One of these days, I'll tell you some alligator stories.  All Floridians have some of those, too.

"Time and Tide Wait for No Man"

I had an interesting time trying to find out who first said that.  Answers.com attributes it to Chaucer in 1390, although I think it's a bit of a reach:

For thogh we slepe or wake, or rome, or ryde, Ay fleeth the tyme; it nil no [will no] man abyde.
[c 1390 Chaucer Clerk's Tale l. 118]

I think it's more like this quote from 1592

Tyde nor time tarrieth no man.
[1592 R. Greene Disputation between He Cony-catcher & She Cony-catcher X. 241]

Which is all a roundabout way of saying that we spent the morning fishing the outgoing tide at Sebastian Inlet, a state park on the East Coast of Florida, not too far from the Silicon Swamp.  (Occasionally really nice pictures here.)  We were up before 5 this morning to be on the water at sunrise because time and tide...  Possibly.  By the clock we were, but you couldn't prove it looking for the sun.  Today was one of those rare days around here with really dense fog - so dense it was hard to tell if the sun was up; so dense it was hard to find markers and stay in safe water until we got into the channel.  Sebastian is a rough inlet, and I definitely don't have a boat safe enough to run it when it's nasty - and it's nastiest on the outgoing tide when the winds are strong out of the east or when big swells from far away storms are bucking the tide.  When these things happen, the inlet gets large standing waves; a set of breakers that stay in the same place for a couple of hours.  I've seen 25 to 30' foot boats almost roll in there.   But it's pretty safe on the inside, and well sheltered from the winds.   

 

By the time I grabbed this picture, the fog had mostly lifted and it was possible to see around.  The sun eventually burned off the fog and turned it into a normal day.  What we were doing there was drifting the inlet channel casting artificials: jigs and plugs. There's always a small fleet of boats in the inlet drifting in the strong current and doing the same thing.  The current runs several knots so we drift from the west end almost to the bridge (a few hundred yards from the mouth of the inlet) then run back inside and start over.  It wasn't much of a fishing trip, we each caught one jack crevalle of about one pound.  As the day wore on, we switched from rain jackets to shirt sleeves and it ended up about 80 by the time we left.  Just a little sunburned. 

The trip to the inlet adds about an hour and a half getting there and back, with around another hour or so cleaning up, but today added even more time.  It was time to change the oil in the outboard, and a bit more oil hit the garage floor than should have leading to more time in cleanup.  Pretty much shot the day. 

It's A Wrap

A diamond wrap to be precise. And the very last touches on the second of two rods I've recently built.

This is the plug rod that I started back in July, then put aside to work on Mrs. Graybeard's rod. 

This was taken while the rod is mounted in my finishing fixture, with a barbecue rotisserie motor spinning the rod to keep the epoxy from running and dripping, above my terribly messy workbench.  The old Penn Spinfisher 710 box contains rod making supplies. You can see spools of thread, a razor knife (orange/red handle), scissors, hemostat, and more miscellaneous tools than I feel like naming.  The rod uses metallic blue and red threads, as well as non-metallic red, blue and white thread.  You can see the metallic blue easily where I have the most of it, at the ends of the diamond - the red threads are in the wrap itself and hard to see here. 

It's dry now.  Might even be fishable in the morning, when we're planning to get out and play.

A Different Kind of Project

The projects I've written about here have tended to be kind of techy - whether it's my little solar panel plaything or my AR-15.  This is a different kind, rather low tech in comparison.  No electronics at all.  No soldering.  No machining (probably).   

I'm making a couple of fishing rods.  Took off Friday for a trip over to a great store that sells everything you need for rod making, Mud-Hole in Oviedo (between Orlando and Sanford).  (No financial affiliation, yada, yada.  I was just really pleased with the service and selection).

I'm not new at this, but like everything else in fishing, it has changed a lot in the 30+ years since I fished regularly.  When I was in my early 20s, and fishing from piers and jetties, I would look at the custom rods in the tackle shops and drool.  Surely all that fancy work had to make a better rod, right?  But on a part-time work/part-time student budget, over a hundred bucks for a custom rod was big money.  So I got a book and learned to do it myself.  Now, in those days, custom rods tended to have a "diamond wrap", a pattern formed by winding thread up and down the blank above the handle.  It was the sign of a custom rod because no factory would spend that much time and effort to do it. Today, some custom rod builders actually weave patterns in the thread

Joey's custom rods, just somedood I found online.  Not mine.  This is the kind of custom thread work guys are doing today.  

Rod making requires virtually no tools except the thread that holds the guides in place.  Add in some glue (usually epoxy), masking tape, a finish (again, usually a clear liquid epoxy), and an Exacto knife or scalpel.  There are some times and places where a little motorization helps, and many makers use a sewing machine motor.  The finishes we use tend to be runny and need to be slowly turned to keep them from looking bad.  I have an ancient barbecue rotisserie motor.  I wound several rods using nothing more than my lap, and wrapped the thread around the pages of the phone book to add tension.  This isn't rocket surgery. 

I still have and fish with the first rod I ever built from purchased parts - right around 1974 or '75, if I recall.  I re-did the diamond wrap around the bottom of the rod a couple of times, with the current build going back to about 1979 or 80.  Being just about 40 years old, the guides were starting to show signs it was time to rebuild the rod.  A spinning rod I built in the early '80s had two guides that actually came apart when I took it out a couple of years ago; the older rod apparently had better guides. 

And I'm building a custom for Mrs. Graybeard that will be beautiful.  Since it has been many years since I've done this, I'm doing mine first as a sort-of sacrificial project.  Better to make my mistakes on this one than the next.  I took the old rod apart today.  Sawed the reel seat in half with a cutoff wheel in a Dremel and pried it off.  Removed all the guides.  Started the process of rebuilding from a bare blank.  I'll update as I go along.