Walkng Late After A No Power Lunch Catching Fosdic Lake Fish Thinking About Safe & Sane River Inner Tubing

There has been no swimming, for me, for two mornings in a row, due to the pool needing to be drained so the underwater lights could be replaced.

Today, at noon, I drove up to North Richland Hills for my weekly Wednesday restaurant rendezvous. As I exited the freeway I got a call telling me the restaurant was closed, due to power being out in the area, due to last night's storm.

North Richland Hills was hit a bit harder, by the storm, than it hit my location.

With the restaurant rendezvous aborted, I continued on to the ALDI Market in Hurst, not knowing if it was powered up or not.

It was.

By the time I had lunch I managed to overeat. I do not like overeating.

Coming up on 5, I decided I needed to get some pedestrian exercise. So, I drove to Oakland Lake Park to walk around Fosdic Lake.

I thought Fosdic Falls might be falling hard due to last night's rain. I was surprised to see Fosdic Falls barely dribbling.

I was also surprised to see so many people angling for fish in Fosdic Lake, where signs warn you to be careful about eating what you catch.

In addition to all the solo fishermen, there were two cute family groups.

The group you see at the top was a grandma, a mom and two kids. I know this because I stopped to talk to them after I took the picture. They'd caught a fish. A very little perch. First fish I've seen caught from Fosdic Lake. I should have asked if I could take a picture of it. But I did not think of that til later.

Grandma told me they don't eat the fish, their cat does.

The other fishing family was a dad with two kids, a girl and a boy. The girl was in a pink ballet tutu.

This group reminded me of my dad. Not due to the pink tutu, but due to the fact that when I was a little kid we'd go on family fishing excursions on the Skagit River. Sometimes it'd just be dad and me and my brother.

The fish one sought from the Skagit was not perch. It was salmon.

My brother strongly caught the fishing gene from my dad. Me, not so much. My brother passed the fishing gene onto my nephew, Joey, who continues to catch a lot of salmon in the Skagit River, without his dad, who has moved to Arizona. Where no salmon spawn in any river. As far as I know.

I never much enjoyed standing on a river or lake bank tossing a fish line in the water. But, I did very much enjoy fishing from a fishing boat out in the San Juan Islands zone. My mom and dad had a nice big boat, sort of a floating camper. Trolling for salmon is fun. Catching cod is fun. Sometimes when trolling for salmon you'd catch a shark instead. Dogsharks. Not as fun as salmon.

My dad caught a halibut over 180 pounds, once, out in the San Juans. I was not along. The local newspaper printed a picture of my dad and the big halibut. I must see if I can locate that picture and one of my dad's dad, my grandpa, with a giant sturgeon he caught in the Nooksack River.

Strange, it never bothered me to float in the Skagit or Nooksack Rivers, particularly the Nooksack. It's a big inner tubing river in summer.

Never crossed my mind to worry about a salmon or sturgeon encounter. No one organizes the massive weekend Nooksack inner tube float parties in summer. It just sort of organically happens.

Not the result of someone's brilliant brainstorm, like the one we learned about yesterday with the announcement of the Trinity River Vision Boondoggle's summer Rockin' the River with Inner Tube Happy Hours.