Ohhh baby!

Both of these pictures are of the same fish who just happened to see my rapala swimming by and decided to eat it. The wind today made it really tough to fish the spot where I caught this lady, so I felt very fortunate to have thrown my lure in the right spot. She weighed 5 lbs 13 oz.

This was my first fish of the day and I had been fishing for about 2 hours before I caught her. It was pretty slow until I finally found a crappie spot and started catching slabs one after another. All said, it turned out to be a pretty good day and I brought home some more nice crappie fillets. Ya gotta love that.

Scenery

That's one thing we have a lot of around here. You don't have to go far to get some pretty good views. Yesterday I rode my bike up to Susanville Peak and sat on the top rock. You can't ride all the way to the top and I had to guess at where to stop along the road to have the shortest hike up. As it turned out I didn't make a very good call and ended up walking much farther than I had to, but it's all good. This first picture is the highest rock pile.



On the way down the road there are some nice overlooks and that's what the second picture is.



But today was a fishing day. There were some really nice calm times today and this is one of them. I was running a rapala through those rocks and getting a few of the smaller fish to bite. I saw some really big ones in there among the rocks but they didn't want my lures. Oh well, maybe tomorrow they will like it better...

Sloat California.. Cheaper gas!

Chris has his own place over in Sloat so I drove over there and went bike riding with him up into Poplar Valley. It was cool to be in some new country from most of my normal bike riding areas. The ridge in the background of this picture is Eureka Ridge. There is still a bit of snow in the high country and we had to traverse one snow patch on our bike ride. From his house our ride gained over 2000 ft of elevation and we had some great downhill runs.

One of the sidelights to this trip was when I went through Quincy I was shocked to see that the gas was 10-15 cents a gallon cheaper over there than it is here in Susanville. Quincy is more remote than Susanville and I have been going through that town regularly for the last 30 years since the Plumas National Forest Supervisor's Office is there and I regularly had to travel there. Gas has almost always been more expensive there than Susanville so when I see that it isn't so now, I can also deduce that we are being screwed once again by the local gas stations who have obviously banded together to control the local price of gas. It's bad enough that it costs so much to fill up your tank these days and it doesn't sit well with me to know that the local gas stations are gouging us even more. Maybe we need a billboard outside of town warning travellers not to buy any more gas here than they need to get to almost any other town in the area so they can save some money. Needless to say I filled my tank while I was over there for the very first time in my life, buying gas in Quincy. Fuck buying local when the locals want to rip you off!