Pictures from my latest hike in the Quebec Run Wild Area

I was able to visit Ohio last week while I was out of school and went turkey hunting with Kenny for three days. We had a great time, but unfortunately, didn't bag any birds. Every day we saw deer either up in the winter wheat field or the meadow. One morning, 5 deer came across the meadow toward me from the wheat field and from what I could tell, they were all bucks (see pic below). That bodes well for deer season this fall. I also had a couple of jakes come to my call from across the meadow. They got to within about 100 yards and then Mass drove by the corner of the meadow on the OSU field with his tractor and they got spooked and flew off. Leroy (Ken) and I also fished a little bit on the Big Darby Creek in West Jeff. I was dumb enough to try and wade across the creek without shoes on and just about fell in 5 times. Kenny couldn't stop laughing at me. In the first picture you can see one of the new tree stands I set up on the property. It is right where the meadow, the winter wheat field, and the bottoms all come together. It overlooks a section of the fence where the deer have been crossing. The other tree stand is set up right in the middle of the bottoms along the old logging road that cuts diagonally across the woods. I took a machete down there and cleared out all of the brush around the stand for shooting lanes.

Last weekend we had a great time steelhead fishing up on the Grand River in northeastern Ohio. We actually never fished the Grand river but a few small streams that flowed into it. As you can see by the pictures we caught a lot of fish. Kenny and I probably caught around 10 fish a piece over the two days we were there. A couple of my buddies from dental school came with us and they had a killer day. They hiked 2-3 miles up this little tiny creek and caught 30-40 fish each. They weren't using anything different than we were but they thought the fish had just never been fished before. The tiny creek they were fishing wasn't more than 5-10 feet across and 1-2 feet deep at most flowing right through peoples back yards. You wouldn't think these huge fish would travel that far up such a small stream.

We caught all of the fish on different types of egg pattern flies. The most popular fly was a cream colored sucker spawn fly which looks like a little clump of eggs. We would put a couple small splitshot about a foot above the flies and caught fish in both the deeper pools and the quick runs. It was the first time my dad and Kenny caught steelhead on a fly rod and I am pretty sure they are hooked. This is by far my favorite type of fishing! I think the largest fish we caught was around 10 pounds and Ken caught the smallest and ugliest fish (minnow). It was so small he could have swallowed it in one gulp!