End of year recap

So the year is coming to a close and now is the time to look back and evaluate my performance for the year.  Or maybe just look back and happily reminisce.  There will be links to some of the main fishing stories/reports for the past year below.  Grab a brew or a nice hot cup of cocoa and sit down and take a journey with me....again.

This year I made it out on the water 53 days.  Of course I didn't count those outings after work where I walked around some carp ponds for an hour or two unsuccessfully.  That's up a decent tick from last year's 40 days.  One new thing I wanted to keep track of this year was a guesstimate of how many fish I caught.  So, each time I went out I wrote my best guess for the final catch in my journal.  The running tally sits at 359.  Not bad!  I wasn't sure what sort of average I would get to, but around 7 fish per outing is actually more than I would have expected, especially with being in a new place and doing some steelheading and salmon fishing where you're lucky if you actually catch something.

I had a number of good trips too.  The Bighorn river annual trip (and here) happened again and was a raging success despite the exponential growth in numbers.  I hit up the Frying Pan River for my first time with some reasonable success.  The Colorado River trip was a bit of a flop but still fun.  And the dream stream was a good but challenging trip.  My backpacking trip was awesome too and is included in the goals overview below.  You should read that one again.

I did an excellent job with my goals for the year, if I do say so myself.  In fact I did quite a bit better than I anticipated.  People have been flocking to this blog and my followers list has ballooned from 9 all the way up to 24!  Pretty soon I'll have to start selling ad space to make millions of dollars.  Goals number two and five fell late in the summer via a very nice steelhead.  I did manage to find a number of sea run cutts in the Fall to scratch goal four.   Goal six was sort of crossed off, but the streamers I have tied are pretty simple and I'd like to make some fancier ones, so I'll probably leave that goal on the list to improve upon for next year.  The long weekend backpacking trip in the Wallowa mountains was a ton of fun and very successful.  Goals eight and nine took a bit of a dog leg left when I moved from Eugene to Portland.  I had actually compiled a list of places around Eugene that I wanted to hit, and tried a good number of them out.  And after moving to Portland I did the same and tried most of them out.

Eugene:

• Salmon Creek 
• Umpqua 
• Row river
• Mackenzie mid river
• Layng creek
• Fall Creek
• Blue River 
• Kirk Pond 
• Delta Ponds 

Portland

• Deschuttes
• Mollala 
• Nehalem 
• Clackamas
• Metolius
• Nestucca 
• Wilson 
• Sandy 
• Eagle creek

The two lists cross off goals eight and nine even though I didn't actually focus on them.  That's pretty easy to do when you move from one pretty new place to a totally new place though, so only minor props for me.

The two main failures for the year were my inability to catch a salmon, and that lack of planning for a trip to Alaska.  The Alaska trip won't be next year, unfortunately.  Instead there will be a couple smaller fishing trips, and I'm mainly hoping to substitute a hunting trip in Colorado that I was considering doing this year but didn't.  As for the salmon, it's tough to catch salmon on the fly, and it's even tougher when you don't really try.  And I really didn't.

All in all I am quite happy with last year.  I'm only left hoping next year is even better!

Have a happy new year everybody.