The End Of An Old Friend

Estes, Texas

A wonderful old black spinning reel of mine had begun to fail to work flawlessly and seemed to need serious maintenance. This friend has been with me for over thirty years and together we have caused a lot of fish meals to grace the tables of lots of folks. So this morning started out with a carefully examination and disassembly of my old friend. As the parts were carefully separated it became very obvious that my old friend was totally worn out. Every thing wobbled and nothing ran true in its bearings. Getting replacements parts was not likely cost effective. It now graces a cabinet in the Castle.

A search for a proper replacement went on for a couple of hours. Finally a trip to the store was taken to get the feel of possible replacements. Wal-Mart had nothing of interest. So on down the road to a local tackle store called Tackle Town. The owners catalog was borrowed as the large assortment of reels were examined. Can you say STICKER SHOCK really loud? That’s not loud enough! The one that seemed like a great reel to me in the catalog was over $250. Nope not me. After working my way down to the price hoped to satisfy, then back up to the minimum requirements for my needs, a Shimano reel was chosen. It was bad enough at $60, but it should be the last reel purchased during the rest of my life.

Here is the changeover in progress. Old friend is on the left and new upstart is on the right.

The good news is that the new reel works very well. That is good. Look out fishes. Speaking of fishes, the cleaning station was getting a big workout this afternoon. Two fellows were keeping a large flock of pelicans well fed. My arrival happened just as they started putting a large pile of fillets into plastic bags. It looked like about two gallons of fillets.

About that time another park fisherman came walking up with his catch to clean. He had a couple of nice redfish.

While on the subject of fishing, let us talk boats or specifically color of yaks. It was my good fortune to have three different colored yaks out on the Flats at the same time. There were a gray, blue and orange ones. Mine is bright yellow. Look at the next three pictures and you will be able to see why mine is a hi visibility color.

The gray yak. Centered across and just below the far shoreline.

The blue yak. a bit left of horizontal center and just below the shoreline in the background.

The orange yak. Location obvious.

Being seen is a number one safety priority to me. It can give me more days of trying to have tooooo much fun. TheOFM