Friday night we went to the Johnson Reagan Richards dinner for the Harris County Democratic Party.  I hadn’t been in a few years. I’ve also been to the Lincoln Reagan Dinner for the Harris County Republican Party.  At the Lincoln Reagan dinner the speakers stand on the stage and toss red meat to the ravenous.  At the Johnson Rayburn Richards dinner, the speakers mostly  talk about how the winds of change are a’comin’ to Texas. They’ve been saying the same thing for years. Nancy Pelosi was the keynote speaker.  I don’t know what kind of a Speaker she’ll make if she again gets the chance, but she’s a remarkably boring and rambling dinner speaker. Kris said she looked good though.

Saturday we drove to New Braunfels. Guadalupe River Trout Unlimited was holding its (our? I’m not a very good joiner, but I am a member) annual troutfest. There were casting instructors but I don’t know where they were instructing.   There were celebrity speakers, but I didn’t see any of them. Nancy Pelosi wasn’t one of them, which was just as well.  Mostly there were a lot of pick-ups parked in a field, some small tents, and a big tent.

We walked about for a bit.  I tried to buy a sweater from Bayou City Angler because it was cold and Kris had appropriated mine.  It might have  been too ironic to drive three hours  to the Guadalupe to buy something from Bayou City Angler,  because they lost their computer link and couldn’t sell anything. I realized later that I could have come by the shop in a day or two and paid, but none of us were thinking that way.

 

I have been to some other trade shows, not a lot but some.  They are all a bit alike I guess. I don’t want to randomly stop and pick stuff up. I did once.  I went through and collected a bunch of Koozies for the boat, but Kris thought it was a joke and threw them away. Yesterday Kris bought a line at the Tenkara USA booth.  I picked up fliers from guide services: Wisconsin, Alaska, New Mexico, Montana. We watched other people, men mostly, mill about.

There were lots of men with beards. Then we went fishing.  We were in a hurry because we had to be back for another dinner last night, but we fished for a couple of hours. I was using a bead egg with a dropper, and hooked a nice fish, but it came off the hook. This was not the fish:

It was only a fish in a tank at TroutFest. I still haven’t caught a Guadalupe trout.

Today we went late to Galveston to take out the boat.  Galveston looked like this:

The photo is a bit hazy, but that’s because everything was a bit hazy.  That’s looking across the street at fog obscuring the Gulf of Mexico. The. Gulf. Is. Gone. We only fish on the bay side of the Island, not the Gulf side, so we hung out at Benno’s eating shrimp po’boys until it cleared enough for us to take out the boat.  I wade fished behind Pelican Island, then we ran down into West Galveston Bay and I poled Kris through what might or might not have been Starvation Cove. The wind was at least 15 knots, and there wasn’t enough water in the bay to get into places, but the water was reasonably clear and it was the first time in a month we’d been able to run the boat.  This winter has been nothing but rain and wind and cold.