Keeping the Ice Off (A Holiday Survival Guide for Fishermen)

‘Tis the season. Holidays are comin’. Heehaw. You are about to fall off the diet wagon and gain back that 12 pounds, get into an argument with an in-law that will haunt you for the next decade and blow your entire rainy-day cash stash on crap that will most likely get given, unused, to Goodwill sometime in the new year. And the next time you break away from the family for some alone on the river time, your fingers are going to freeze and the guides of your fly rod are gonna ice up. Sorry to be so brutal, but look on the bright side…now if only one of these things happen to you in the next month and a half you will consider this holiday season a success! Here is some free advice from Jay to avoid all these holiday pitfalls. Drink way too much whisky on Thanksgiving and Christmas. This may seem inadvisable, but hear me out…whisky is as effective as bulimia at saving a diet minus all the self hatred. You will still say the same antagonizing shit to your in-laws, but with the support of the whisky, they won’t understand you! This will still be embarrassing for your spouse, but that is perfect…it is just the right sort of diversion to distract them all from the fact you, once again, didn’t buy anyone any gifts! Heehaw! As for the ice filling up your tip top and snake guides, there are a number of things to prevent this. You can pick up some ice-off paste at a fly shop or smear lip balm on the guides. This keeps them ice-free for a bit, but you have to keep reapplying it. Probably the best thing to do is keep your fly line clean and dressed and not make casts long enough to require you to retrieve fly line back through the guides of your fly rod. The water is low…you can get right up onto the pools, anyway. No need for long casts.

This is exactly why I write a fishing blog…and not a self-help piece in your local newspaper. Again…Heehaw!