Florida

When I told Kris I was starting a blog, she asked me if it was about baseball. I’m a pretty obsessed baseball fan, but write about baseball? I’ll leave writing about baseball to people with some actual knowledge.

That said, the team of which I am a fan, the Houston Astros, won the World Series last year–you may have heard, but it never gets old in the telling.  Kris goes to most games with me, and we go to a lot of games. At games Kris stops watching by the third inning and reads magazines (pre-internet) or plays Words with Friends (post-internet). From April to October, if I’m not at the game, most nights I watch the television in my office and talk to my friends on the internet about the game’s progress.

A month or so ago Kris announced that we were going to West Palm Beach in February for the first games of spring training.  Kris now is not only a theoretical fan–she goes to games–she apparently wants to go to games.  I doubt she’ll give up Words with Friends though.

I never thought seriously about going to spring training, and I had already booked us to Tampa in June when the Astros play the Rays. It’s apparently the thick of tarpon season, and Kris has caught a tarpon but I haven’t.

We’re flying into Fort Lauderdale on Friday February 23 and flying out the next Sunday.  I’ve booked us a guide for a half day on Saturday morning, one Scott Hamilton at Fly Fishing Extremes.  It’s my first chance at a foreign fish since I started this, and since my January luck with Texas fish has been so poor, it may be my first chance for a fish.

*Actually, during two of the ‘Stros three 100+ loss seasons, 2011-2013, I wrote a weekly game recap on a local website.  They rarely had much to do with the games, but if I may say so myself they were pretty funny. Nothing else about those seasons was funny.

Bleak Midwinter

 

Yesterday afternoon we took the boat out on Galveston Bay.  When we left the Galveston channel around 2 the bay was smooth enough to open the throttle.  It must have been somewhere close to 60˚.  We polled around Greens Lake for a bit, but saw no fish.  Low tide was hours before, but it was still low midwinter water, about 8″ where it would normally be at least a foot.  By three the wind had picked up to about 15 and shifted to the northeast. The temperature was dropping and the ride home was a tooth-rattler.  Today in Houston there’s snow, and it’s 27˚.

Sun is shining, and we’re in the Intercoastal.

These were the only other flats skiffs we saw.