It's great to see some activity in the weblog. I hadn't checked it in a few days and so it's always exciting to come back to find a few fish in the net, so to speak. I've scattered through this posting a few postage stamp-sized images which you can click on to see a bigger image. The pictures are of an ice fishing trip I took yesterday with a few friends from work. Most of these pictures are self-explanatory, except for the one where my friend is laying on the ice with his head covered with a blanket and looking down through the hole in the ice. The reason is that the water is clear enough that you can actually see the fish swimming around beneath the ice!

I had not been ice fishing in more than 17 years. I know this because I can't recall having gone ice fishing since being married. It's a crazy activity when you think about it, except for when you start catching fish, and then it's exciting and lots of fun. There's always a risk that the fish won't be biting and yesterday they were biting way less than normal. But I did manage to catch an 18' rainbow trout and my friend Bob caught a 14" cutthroat trout. Ice fishing requires you to get up pretty early and perhaps this is why I haven't done it in so long. I'm not an early morning person. I had to get up at 4:15 so I could meet my friends in Fort Collins at 5:30 and then we drove for several hours to Lake John, on the other side of the Continental Divide which meant going up through Laramie, Wyoming. The scenery was spectacular all the way there and we had a good time catching up and reminiscing about old times. I've known Bob and Kelly for nearly 20 years and our career paths have crossed several times in the intervening years and we have many friends in common.

We fished for nearly 8 hours and with only two fish to show for our efforts, we figured each one took about 13 man-hours of effort to produce. It was a very slow day for the fish, but at least we didn't get skunked and there are worse places to be than on a frozen snow-covered lake surrounded by a few good friends and snow capped mountains, provided you're dressed for the occasion, of course.