Our New Home - Kansas

You know it's been a long time since you posted when you can't remember your password to your blog site. There's a few excuses why I haven't blogged in a while.

1. I moved and have not had internet for over a month.
2. I'm too lazy to go to the library.
3. I haven't had a lot of content anyway.

We made the big move at the end of May over Memorial weekend. I thought we were going to get our house at that time so I accepted a position at the hospital to do purchasing and moved across the country.

We were not able to move into our house right away because the people we are going to be renting from are remodeling the house they will be moving in to. At first we were going to get the house in the middle of May, then the end of May, then the end of June. Now they are saying they might be in their new place by August. I'm hoping we will be in there by fall.

We have all of our belongings in the living room of that house and my boat in the garage. In the meantime we are living with our Sister and Brother in law and their nine children.

It has been a fun summer so far. I spent the first week with Mizike and Kimmer in Oklahoma. We caught up and did a little fishing at Thunderbird Lake. I caught a nice bass a nice catfish and a nice drum all on a rubber worm. We kept the drum to eat it. It was really a good tasting fish with big white flakes. It reminded me a lot of eating a walleye.

Here's Mizike with my catfish

                                          This is the Drum we ate!

Leo had a couple crappie to the bank but couldn't get them up onto the rocks where we were fishing and Mizike caught one crappie we ate for supper.

Once I got back to Kansas, (right on the Oklahoma border) I started my new job. We have been to see my parents and Christina's parents several times already, along with a reunion and my grandfather's 80th birthday party. It is nice to be close to family again.

This weekend has been my only other fishing trip. We fished Kaw Lake and Sooner lake in Oklahoma.  I didn't catch a thing but Leo, Mizike and Ryan all caught a fish a piece.  Mizike had the first fish.  He caught a little tiny, small, miniscule, itsy, teeny, catfish.  (That still doesn't help me get over the fact that he out fished me.)  Ryan caught a white bass.  We had saw them splashing the surface, chasing shad for a split second.  He got in there with the right bait and got one.  I had a gar on but the hook.  It pulled loose as it torpedoed away from the boat.  Leo out fished me again and had the biggest fish of the day when he pulled in a 2 1/2 to 3 pound channel cat nightfishing at Sooner lake.

It was extremely hot in the middle of the day when we did most of our fishing.  It was close to 110 degrees.  We had to jump in the lake a few times to cool off.  It wasn't ideal conditions for catching fish but it still seemed that we should have caught more fish at Kaw.  I would like to try it in the spring and fall to see if it is better then.  There's been too many times where I ruled out excellent fishing lakes from one trip to them, come to find out, years down the road, that they had awesome fishing.

Now I am dealing with trying to get cars and the boat tagged. I'm also attempting to get my driver's license before August when it expires. I have been to the DMV twice in the last 2 weeks. I have to take a half a day off to go then drive an hour each direction. The first time I had a birth certificate and my birth registration card along with everything else they asked for.

The said my birth certificate was the wrong one and they stopped accepting birth registration cards in 2007. I tried to order a new birth certificate from the state and they said since they were mailing it to a Kansas address I had to have a Kansas driver's license. WHAT???? That's what I need it for. Then they told me I had to have a blood relative order one for me.

I called Mom and she said she has the original. She said I could borrow it but would have to give it back so I don't lose it. THIS IS MY BIRTH CERTIFICATE RIGHT? Luckily she had a second one she had ordered to give me a long time ago.

The next Friday I take off a half a day on Friday. I get to Pratt and the County Examiner had taken the day off. Oh, by the way, they only do out of state driver's licenses on Thursdays and Fridays. Brilliant!

The car tags are going about as good. We bought a Ford Explorer to pull the boat once we move here and have been able to get that tagged but once you go to tag out of state vehicles with Liens on them look out! Nothing is good enough.

Amazingly everything else worked out so well. The house sold the day I was moving. I got a job offer a couple days before I was moving and we have a place to stay while we are waiting on our rental.

The Last of my Ohio Fishing Experiences

The closer I get to the move the more hectic my life is becoming. This weekend I will be moving, then things should start slowing down.

The last post I had I was preparing to fish a club tournament at Buckeye. We fished that tournament. My predictions were somewhat right. The fish were either hard to catch or had been caught the day prior. I ended up with 2 fish, good enough for 4th or 5th place in the club. The winds were blowing about 30 mph so we were confined to the channels.

The next weekend we had a club open tournament at Alum Creek. The weather was awful. We had high winds again, rain, and at one point the boat was covered in hail. There was only 1 person that caught a bass all day. He did catch a nice 5 pound smallmouth. I tried everything including taking the boat through a narrow culvert to fish an area that never gets fished. The boat got scratched on the bolts. Even that didn't work.

I had a few weeks off and last weekend the club had another tournament at Rupert lake. I had an interview in Kansas so I missed the tournament. Quite a few large bass were brought in to weigh in.

This weekend we fished Knox lake. We hit it perfect for the spawn. Bass were on beds everywhere. My day started off horribly. I had 7 fish come unbuttoned before I could get them in the boat. It was more than likely the way they were biting. I got it figured out though and ended up having 5 nice bass for the weigh in. Several were 2 to 2 1/2 pounders. We had a paper tournament since Knox has an 18 inch length limit. Nobody caught a bass over 18 inches. I finished 4th in the tournament with 9.7 pounds. Third place was 9.76 and Gene who was fishing with me had 9.85 pounds and finished 2nd. The winner had slightly over 10 pounds.

Knox was a great tournament and gave me some much needed practice on sight fishing. I had 2 baits that worked well to get them to strike. One was a small red slugo rigged on a drop shot. The other was a 6 inch morning dawn roboworm rigged wacky style on a flick shake jig head. I would cast out to where there beds are and twitch the baits until they would strike.

With the big move being only a week away, I am pretty fortunate to have things work out the way they have. The house sold really quick. We had to take a loss. I had a face to face interview last weekend for a position at the local hospital in Kiowa. If that doesn't work out I will try to start my own business there. Our house is not quite ready for us to move into but the owners are going to let us keep our things there until they are moved out. I have also trained my replacement at my current position.

I don't have any plans to fish any more tournaments this year once I am moved to Kansas. That will likely change once I am there and look into the tournament scene. For now I am looking to fishing for fun with my parents, friends, and Leo and Gavin once I return.

Next year I would like to get back into the FLW BFL and see what other circuits work with that schedule.

Fishing Time

My world has been tumbling for over a month now. Am I Finally at the bottom of the hill? I have been without my wife and kids for 4 or 5 weeks now. Loneliness has sank in. At first I had an overwhelming workload to accomplish. I had to paint, pack, clean, repair everything so we can sell the house. The house is listed now and the first potential buyer is coming today to look at it.

I have put in my notice at my work so that they could establish a plan of action for getting me replaced. I will be moving to Kansas May 27th. That gave us 1 week to do phone interviews, 1 week for face to face interviews and we will hopefully have 5 weeks of training. I will stay out here longer if needed to get the person trained.

We have a house lined up in Kiowa, KS. It will be nice to be close to family again.

During my struggles with the house I did manage to get out fishing 1 time so far. Gene and I went to Buckeye lake to prefish for our club tournament coming up tomorrow. He caught 2 bass and I managed to catch 5. Unfortunately, I caught the only 3 that would have kept. One was a hefty 2 to 2 1/2 pounder. We put together a game plan on where we would start out come tomorrow.

It will be a tough tournament. They are having a large tournament at Buckeye today. I am guessing they are hitting the canals hard and plucking all the bass. We will be throwing back a lot of 11 1/2 inchers tomorrow.

I have one spot that I think could be ok. It is a feeding flat that I located. Not that the whole lake is not flat but this spot was a little shallower had some close structure and I saw quite a few bass chasing shad there. Besides stopping at that spot a couple times we will be beating the canals with the rest of the crowd. I will try a couple main lake areas but there isn't a lot of the main lake that looks great.

Now the house is ready. The weather is just starting to warm. We have our first tournament this weekend, and will have tournaments the next few weekends. It is fishing time in Central Ohio.

Plaques

The ice is finally off the lakes around here. Now the lakes and rivers are all to high to fish. Not all of them but we have been getting plenty of rain to keep everything full.

We had our bass club meeting tonight. I received some plaques from last season for largest bass, biggest stringer and 3rd place in the fish off. It was pretty cool to get all those. I didn't even know I had the biggest stringer of the year. That is for the lakes besides Lake Erie.

This season I hope to start out even stronger with what I had learned last year. Really, I just want to get out fishing again. I have bought quite a bit of gear and baits over the winter I can't wait to try out.

Christina and the boys moved back to Kansas this weekend. I am hoping to have the house the rest of the way packed and ready to paint by this weekend. If I can get it painted this weekend, the rest of my time spent here in Ohio can go towards work and fishing.

Our first club tournament will be April 10th. That doesn't give me much time to get everything done and get out a few times before then.

Need a New Name for the Blog

Christina has been offered and accepted a position in Kansas. She moves back with the kids on March 12th. I will remain here until the house sells.

The realtor comes Tuesday to put the house on market. We have had a contractor fixing up quite a few things that have needed fixing for a while.

We have been packing. Once Christina gets back to Kansas she will stay with her sister until we can find a rental place. Then we will move all of our things except for the bare essentials. I will remain here at least until the house sells. This way I can train my replacement and we can continue to pay our mortgage until the house sells.

I don't foresee the house selling quickly so I will probably get most of another tournament season in here. I am going to take another shot at as many BFL's as I can fish here. I will also fish all the club tournaments I can. Once I get the house completed and ready to sell I should have quite a bit of time to fish. I will be disconnecting cable shortly so no t.v. Not that I will want to watch that anyway. I'd rather spend my free time fishing.

Moving to Kansas

Things have not slowed down at work. I'm glad this is the off fishing season. I have been updating our computer system. I have created an all new payroll system and scheduling system to keep up with the demand of our client. That is a major undertaking. We had gotten all my work installed last week and now are working out the kinks. We should be fully functional by the end of the week.

What does that mean for me? Not much. I have another huge project starting that will help our client from ordering extra associates to being able to pull up information that is not currently available to match up their orders to the invoices.

I didn't realize I would be doing so much IT work, or that I even had the knowledge to do the type of work I have been doing. Most of it has just been updating our current system. Everything I am doing should make the job easier for the next person that takes my position.

This weekend I took my boys to the Ohio Sports, Vacation, Travel and Boat show. I got some good deals on some Warrior baits. It helped that I know the owner. I also bought some baits from Hookerz tackle. Both companies are local and have some baits that should work great in this area, as well as across the country.

Once I got home I re-arranged all of my tackle. Leo and Gavin were hovering over me like vultures snatching up anything that I will not use any more. They had their tackle boxes open and by the end, their boxes were full of tackle.

We were at Gander Mountain the other day and Christina picked out a new pole for Leo. It was med/light action ugly stick spinning combo made for kids. This seems like a quality open face rod, nicer than anything I had before last year. If Christina tells me to spend money on fishing gear, who am I to say no.

Leo has been practicing casting out in the yard quite a bit. I can't believe how fast he picked up on how to use a spinning rod. Before long he'll be learning a baitcast. He can fish too. I'd partner bass tournament with him any day. He's 4 years old and learning so much. He'll be 5 on Wednesday.

Gavin has a ways to go. He's wanting to cast now with his spongebob pole, but doesn't seem as into it as Leo was at 2 years old. Leo has any fishing magazine or catalog as soon as it comes in the mail. I have to wait for him to look through it before he'll let me look at it.

I had mentioned previously that we may be moving towards Missouri. It's now looking like we may be moving all the way back to Kansas. We want to be closer to family. The area we are looking at now is not great for fishing. The closest decent sized lake is 1 1/2 hours away. There are some smaller lakes and ponds close though.

It would be nice to fish more with Dad and Mom. The area is also great for raising a family. I will still travel to catch BFL's and some other tournaments. Those lakes are up to 9 hours away with the closer ones only 4-5 hours away. I'm determined to make a name for myself fishing. Even if it isn't a huge name.

I will miss it here in Ohio. I have made a lot of fishing connections in the last couple years. It seems like I am always getting e-mails or IM's from people I have met fishing. I just hope I can find something close to what I have here after I move.

I don't know if I will be here at the start of tournament season this year. Things are moving pretty quickly with job prospects back home. We have a ton to do. We have to get our belongings ready to move, land jobs, sell the house, rid items we don't need to move, and then get everything going once we get there.

It's a pretty nerve racking experience to move across the country, when you've developed roots where your at. When we moved to Ohio, we planned on living here for 5 years. We have been here over 7 now. We've experienced a lot living here, and took advantage of getting to see a different part of the country.

It's time to get back to where we came from.

Catch Up

In the last post I said that the ice was just starting to form. It's thick now. That was a major lapse in posting.

Work has been extremely busy. Once I transferred I had a 1 week training period before I took over. At that point all kinds of work was thrown at me at once. I keep my head down and grind through it each day. I have to say that I am ready for a day off soon though.

We stayed home for Christmas instead of traveling back to Kansas. That didn't feel much like holidays.

I have not done any fishing, or anything fishing related in forever. I really want to go out ice fishing. Dad went out this week in Kansas and caught quite a few crappie and bluegill. He got first fish of the year again this year. He even caught a 20 inch bass. Sounded like he really got into them.

We have our first club meeting of the year coming up and our awards banquet. I'm pretty excited about that since I got big bass of the year last year.

I have not paid my entry to the FLW BFL yet. I'm not sure if I will be able to fish it. There might be a possibility of another job offer soon. It would be in Missouri, a lot closer to home. I would seriously consider it, if I get the offer.

I think the thing I like the most about living in Ohio is the club and the guys in the club. I will miss them if I ever move. I would be in a great fishing area if I ended up in Missouri though.