An Outdoorsman‛s Journal

April Surprise

Hello, friends: I am just about finished with what I believe has been the busiest winter of my life: eight winter camping trips and a go-for-it adventure to the state of Mississippi with my 21-year-old daughter Selina camping, and hunting hogs and deer in The Delta National Forest. As president and founder of Kids and Mentors Outdoors (KAMO) www.kamokids.org I have been giving it everything that I can to see that all seven of our chapters get back on their feet after the COVID-19 punch in the face that the world took and hopefully is getting past.

This past week I stayed home and spent some time with Selina, who was home for three days, and I will soon leave for a canoe fishing trip at De Pere on the Fox River to fish for trophy walleye.

Two days after I get home, I am heading to Red Lake, Ontario, Canada, to visit with my good friends Pete and Elizabeth Hagedorn for Pete’s 84th birthday, and to ice fish. The day after I get home, I am heading down to Beaver Dam to speak at a Whitetails Unlimited banquet, and the beat goes on!

This week I am writing a “because I can” type of column and, in reality, it is to slow my brain and body down so that the overload I am on does not literally overload who I am.

KAMO! We have chapters near Beaver Dam, Poynette, Baraboo, Necedah, La Crosse, Marshfield and Florence. In a year’s time, we help a lot of kids enjoy the outdoors. Like just about everything else in the world, COVID-19 kicked our butt, but KAMO survived, and now we are doing our best to do what our name suggests. We need mentors especially in Poynette and Marshfield, but everywhere that I mentioned. KAMO activities can be one-on-ones or group events and it could be time spent in a kayak around a campfi re or in a turkey blind. Please help if you can, everyone is volunteering, we do background checks, and in a year’s time, it really make a difference.

As I mentioned, Selina was home. She has not been here since Christmas break and she is and has been paving the way for an incredible future. With double majors in fisheries and aquatic sciences as well as water resources, a minor in soil science, and her certificate in wetland sciences, as well as a job at UW-SP in the bug lab, it actually scares me when I think about how busy she is.

The day after school gets out, she is packing her car and heading to Eureka, Mont., near the northwest Montana/ Canadian border, where she has been given an excellent internship with the U.S. Forest Service in the area of fisheries.

Two months ago, Selina asked me to give her a good class on running a chainsaw and I did that while she was home. I started with the actual running of a chainsaw, including bar oil and gas/oil mix, and ended with Selina doing all of the cutting in the woods, including dropping her first tree. I am going to tell you, I was nervous as H-E-double toothpicks when she ran the saw, but everything worked out and when she is in Montana she intends on getting her chainsaw safety certificate.

I said I was heading to De Pere to fish walleye out of my canoe. I do this annually. It is as insane as fishing gets with literally boat-to-boat traffic and I will probably be the only canoe, but three inches of badly-needed rain the last few days has created flooding and chocolate milk for river clarity and my river time will be in the dark for the most part. When you catch a trophy walleye in that manner, you have had a good day!

I am hoping that the limited time for my Canada trip does not get delayed enroute by snow as there is nothing but below-zero temperatures forecast for the next 10 days. In all honesty, I thrive on living on this “edge” of the everything way of life, from time, to safety, to cash flow, and the bonuses like KAMO and teaching a young lady how to run a chainsaw.

Sometime between April 1st and 10th there is a potential for something very cool to happen in my life and hopefully I will be writing about that in a couple of weeks.

At 60 I feel as healthy as I did at 30. Keeping the weight down, not smoking, and moving the body with regularity are some of my keys to my success! Sunset