Sounds like an amazing 8 years

it was, i hit almost all the towns. stayed till it was time to leave. fished every good river and gambled in every place that had something.

You got a list of rivers for me to write on a bucket?

a big list of things for anyone's bucket that shouldn't be missed.

Is this how you ran into Zeno?

i met zeno in san jose ca. .. each year for awhile i had a 2 plus 2 get together when i was down there playing the big no limit game in the area. we would meet someplace and i would buy the beer. zeno drove two hundred miles for the free beer. he kind of grows on you like moss on a tree. he is a little bit nicer in person than on the forums though.

rick, one spot i liked in the east for trout was quabbin reservoir in mass. long time back but caught many big trout in it.
but for river fishing i preferred the housatanic in conn.
but the overall best fishing was sight fishing off the beaches for bluefish and stripers.
not unusual to have a good day catching all kinds of fish between 10 and 30 pounds in the surf.

I literally grew up on the housatonic in Western Mass

Pretty sure i never fished it because everyone was scared of the pollution from GE so mainly fished it's tributaries instead. Mostly little streams you can wade across or even leap over at parts with little tiny trout. There were also some lakes/ponds and slower moving rivers but they lacked trout.

Never fished quabbin but my cousin fished it a bit but always had to watch out for the game wardens

How long ago was that if you don't mind me asking?

50 years. so my info is a little bit dated.

but i never keep trout so pcb isnt a factor.

Is there any surf fishing on the west coast like the blues and stripers?

mostly for surf perch. also salmon when they are ready but not very common.
in puget sound searun cutthroat trout are still abundant and fun.

great clamming and crabbing. but the surf fishing sucks really compared to the east coast.

I think you'd be really disappointed if you fished out east again.

I remember when I grew up we were always warned to never go near that river. Pretty sure the pollution happened in late 70s early 80s so timeline fits. Also makes perfect sense it'd be good fishing before GE given remote location and the tributaries were great despite being super small.

And ocean fishing, can't speak for further south but it's basically dead up in Maine. The baitfish no longer come up into the sound where my family lives so that means no mackeral, blues or stripers. When I was a kid we used to catch stripers off the dock and if we took a dingy out past the rocks and into the main sound we could literally fill it up by jigging for mackeral bringing them up 4 at a time. Those days are long gone. I barely am up there anymore but always give fishing a shot when I am and haven't caught anything in years up there. Will always ask the neighbors and other people passing by in the boats will always slow down and inquire because they too are hoping the fish have come back. Hoping it's just isolated to that one sound though.

Not hard to see it go this way though. My grandfather used to be able to catch Pollack and flounder when he moved up there in the 60s and those are no more. But the stripers were gone for close to a decade before coming back in the late 90s. Having said that, when stripers came back the bluefish started petering out.

Fishing up in Maine each summer it was blues as a little kid and they were replaced by stripers as a teen. Mackeral were always around. Aboit the time I went to college even mackeral started slowing down.

My cousins still spend a lot of time up in Maine and don't even bring their rods anymore. They say the fishing is much better in Rhode island.

yea its better south of maine for sure. but i used to go to maine for landlocked salmon and trout long ago. mostly liked it around moosehead lake and rangley. too many no- see- ums for me though. they bit until i was bleeding.
florida still has lots of salt fish to catch. but all over the world its gotten worse to the point of no return.

Yeah, Maine is too cold for permanent aquatic residents (even the lobster leave in the winter) so it's always relied upon schools of baitfish coming into the sounds in the summer to lure the predators and any baitfish that get anywhere near the coast are immediately scoped out and swept up by the fishing fleets

Remember when a huge school of herring came into the sound. There were spotting planes and they basically dragged nets across and waited them out.

It's super depressing actually, freshwater is manageable but the ocean is too big and it's a zero sum game. Really think the future for saltwater fishing is local species that don't migrate or school

We another get together, Ray.

That was a pretty good attempt at a sentence there, Zeno

its afternoon for him so you know that his senses are compromised.

so zeno we sure should do no.

Yeah.

And if the essential meaning/information of a sentence is conveyed; that is all that matters. The rest is just superficial fluff, like a yellow beanie on a dwarf. So what!

in no limit and pot limit games especially omaha i see most all the good players making a big mistake. that is when they have more money they dont tighten up as much as they should or build the pot properly. this way they find themselves with too much money left late in the hand and subject themselves to getting bluffed out or paying off too big a bet from someone that hit something.

I call this "thinking backwards," by which I mean imagining what you want the pot to look like on the river, and then figuring out how to get there. It's important preflop but it's really important on the flop as far a betting goes.

Where I live, all the no limit games had converted to pot limit games by the 90s -- hold em, omaha, stud -- all of them, so you had to think this way or you'd get hung up to dry. I think when the hold em games went back to no limit, a lot of people lost the opportunity to learn. They don't get paid with their big hands and they get forced into tough decisions with maybe-winners.

good way to look at it mack. so many pots are lost or stacks broken just because of this over sight.

my current omaha game has gotten a lot tougher lately. mostly better players, as such results get worse. it changes so have to wait it out sometimes. but the second game which starts later is always much better. but thats when i like to go home. so i might have to vary my schedule if i want to do things for the best.

ive been swimming a lot lately. most every day and its fun and a decent workout doing aggressive laps or just splashing around. swimming pools are great but the maintenance is a pain if you get behind on it.

Do you have an indoor pool? We have a couple of outdoor pools here that are fed by hot springs. It's fun to do laps on really cold days, but it's hard to get out and run for the car.

outdoor screened in pool. its heated though. nice to just step out the back door into the water.