“No Winter Lasts Forever; No Spring Skips Its Turn.”

I dredged this up from 2008 and thought that everything I wrote about winter 3 years ago holds true today. This winter has been extra tough as I am helping a relative that refuses to be helped. Anyway enjoy these musings from a few years back....I think it's one of the best I've written.



Websters defines cabin fever as "extreme irritability and restlessness from living in isolation or a confined indoor area for a prolonged time"
The clinical definition is Seasonal Affective Disorder or some call it the shack nasties and yes I have it. Since my retirement I have the onset of the "winter blues". I've touched on this before in other entries but this season seem to be the worst I've dealt with. Constantly cold,drizzly and days that are too short. My favorite winter steelhead stream has a mudslide in the upper river that has kept the lower twenty miles of the main stem (most of the river) the color of a cappuccino and thus unfishable. The other nearby rivers have ran high for almost all of the winter and since I am not a gear fisherman it makes the swinging of flies tough and I don't need any more handicaps in hooking winter steelhead on a fly than I already have.
With ice and snow on nearly all of the coastal range passes and gasoline topping out over $3 well you get the picture. If it sounds like I'm whining or making excuses then I confess but you can only tie so many flies,watch so many fishing DVDs and have so many heated political or conservation debates with the unlearned so called sportsmen on the internet before it gets to you.
So my edginess may be more evident in my postings this time but bear with me for a few more months.
How I long for those exciting first few trout excursions of the spring over to the Deschutes and what I wouldn't give to feel a two inch long salmon fly crawling down my neck because it's late spring along the Deschutes. Those lazy late summer days of the coast streams where the new trout water I discovered awaits me and my four weight.
I can just feel it now! The warm breeze of the desert canyon with the juniper and sage doing natures aroma therapy on my soul.
When I'm hiking up above the locked gate on the Deschutes this year I'll remember the cold of winter and rejoice in the little things that are all a part of my angling life.
So fellow winter sufferers take heart in what British poet Anne Bradstreet wrote about winter.
“If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.”