Ugly Stik For Snakes

Adventure Location: Rockport, Texas
Estimated Rolling Date: Feb. 12, 2012

The email asked what is used to measure the fish for legality.  The answer is different rulers have been tried and this one is soon, I hope, to be tried.  A couple of years ago one was put on a Berkley Cherrywood rod to try it out.  Within three casts the rod exploded into several pieces.  Now the only rod used is the Shakespeare Ugly Stiks.  They are holding up very well and have decent action.

The story of how Ugly Stiks came to be in my life is worth telling.  A few years ago the Teams were down in Zapata, Texas checking out the area.  We stopped in Falcon Lake Tackle because the owner writes an interesting but not always family oriented blog.  He was a neat fellow in person.  At the time a lot of Falcon Lake had a lot of water up in the trees.  The rattlesnakes had taken to living in the trees and catching fish for a living. The owner of the shop told me that every fisherman needs his good fishing rods and an Ugly Stik rod in the boat.  The Ugly Stik was for beating the snakes out of the trees since nothing can hurt an Ugly Stik.  My immediate thought was that an Ugly Stik might stand up to my stupidities and they have.

So a few days ago while drooling all over everything in a favorite toy store named Tackle Town here in Rockport, it occurred to me to try out this type of ruler again and maybe even get to use it.  The new model even has stickers to mark the slot limits for your fish as you will see.

Here we have the ruler as it comes from the factory

 The ruler was unpacked and made ready.  Then the rod was given a really good cleaning to give the sticky ruler a chance to stick.

This time a different style was chosen that the suggested mounting in the instructions.  As it worked out the butt section of my main rod is ten inches long.  That is the same as the minimum length of crappie.  So the new ruler was trimmed to make use of the end of the butt of the rod as the starting part. The other end of the ruler stopped just before the joint of the two piece rod.  This was going together very well.

 After the sticky ruler was placed on the rod very carefully it was time to check it for stretch.  For some unreasonable reason it was inadvertently placed on the rod correctly to my surprise.  Now all that was left to do was put on the slot limit stickers for the different fish.  The Texas Parks and Wildlife book was opened to the limits page and each type of fish was carefully reviewed before the sticker was irrevocably installed on the rod.

Now all the needed information is mounted right on the rod so the Catching Team can stay legal on fish sizes for the normal fish caught in our efforts.

Keeping the game wardens out of your pocket book really enhances trying to have tooooo much fun. TheOFM.