Do I smell a skunk?

So I'm in the final stages of planning an early spring fishing trip with some friends to the famed Bighorn river in MT; home to thousands of fish per mile, mostly in the 17-20" category.  I was tasked with getting daily prizes for a number of competitions we will have.  The normal things go, like biggest fish, most fish daily, etc., but the best category is daily skunk prizes/punishments.  I had some fun over the past week thinking of good, funny, and possibly painful ideas for the people pathetic enough to fall into this bucket on the trip.  For those of you who don't know, if you can't catch a fish on the Bighorn, you may as well pack it in.

Some of the prizes/punishments are good natured and are meant to build the fishing skills of the sucker who gets them.  The others are meant as mean-hearted punishments because you deserve them!

The main purpose of this post is to make those who read it and who are going on the trip tremble in fear, but I will post in a month what my gifts were for those of you who are interested in doing the same in the future.

Excuses

So I have a good excuse for not fishing last weekend, I promise.  The weather looked good here, the rivers were at a pretty good level: not too low and not too high.  It was probably the perfect steelheading conditions, not that I really know exactly what that would be.  But I still didn't make it out to fish.  :(

But I swear that I have a good excuse.  Being a holiday weekend I took the chance to meet some college friends for a wicked ski trip.  Yes, I said wicked!  A huge winter storm rolled in right before we got there for the weekend and dumped about a million inches of snow in the region.  Then we rolled in, at least everyone but Steve who had some flight trouble, and dumped our asses all over the slopes.

 

It was probably the best three consecutive days of skiing I have ever had, although my legs are still recovering now a week later.

And as a great bonus, we had one wonderful night in Reno and I came out a few doll hairs in the black at the blackjack table.

Sorry for the non-fishing post, but fishing isn't everything.  Just mostly everything!