I'm back, or at least I think I'm back. I started this blog a few months ago but due to some issues beyond my control, I abandoned it. I've had to rename it, and give it a new url, but even though the names have been changed to protect the innocent, my stories are the same.

I like fishing, and I like musicianing. I don't do either for a living, but I've done them both for a long, long time. And I don't currently get to do enough of either, for my liking.

My email address is called el fishing musician because, well, fishing musician was taken and I live in Texas where the spanish influence is heavy, which is at the very least a bastardized concept. But I digress, which I do alot.

I play in two bands right now, and go fishing every chance I get. Salt or fresh, river, stream or lake, pretty much anywhere I can get to and engage in fishing. Fishing is my golf, as it were.

I plan vacations around fishing. When I take trips for business or pleasure, I might not always be able to do some fishing, but I always try to scheme a way to do some fishing. I've been going to California several times a year and of course the wonderful scenery out there just beckons you to go forth with rod and reel, whether by the ocean or in the mountains. Which in California can at times be salt or freshwater fishing within mere miles of one another.

I've done some saltwater fishing on several occasions there, and it is nothing less than a hoot. You catch fish. On ocean fishing charters, I've caught so many fish I got tired and rested the last third of the trip. I had limited out and gave my limit to social security retirees who fished for food. They didn't seem to be catching many fish, and not many of the kind they wanted to eat. Of all things, it was in December and offshore from San Diego, but the fishing was more on that I had ever known in a lifetime of fishing. I'll tell that story one day, and about how my travel companion Lee decided he didn't want to use our free day in the middle of the seminar to, as he said "waste it going fishing in winter". Instead, he played video games in the hotel lobby. Each to his own.

The second best time I've had fishing was also in salt water, oh so many years ago in South Padre Island, Texas. On a family vacation, staying at The Sand Castle condos on the bay side of the Island, there was one night fishing on the pier where I just couldn't stop catching fish. They were smaller fish than the huge ones I caught years later in San Diego, but were prolific in numbers and in species. I even caught several varieties of angel type fish, which I haven't seen before or since in the bays of the Gulf of Mexico.

But that evening in South Padre was some thirty-seven years ago, back in '72, when I was just a lad. That was when it only had a couple of hotels and a couple of condos. The rest of the inhabited part of the island was stilt beach houses, some quite nice. The Bahia Mar hotel development by either Pan Am or Braniff Airlines had just opened, and it was fancy.

This is, of course, before spring breakers and MTV discovered Padre Island and before high rise condos replaced the iconic Texas stilt beach houses that filled the residential area of South Padre Island.

I'll try to regain my loyal japanese readers soon, but until then thought I'd talk about fishing.