Went Fishing, but the Fish Never Got the Memo

When I'm not writing, I'm usually outdoors. I do a lot of hunting and fishing. You really can't do much hiking around here: no hills, no mountains, no trees; and farmer's tend to frown on people hiking through their wheat fields.

This past weekend, I spent a lovely Saturday afternoon fishing with hubby, middle child, and her boyfriend. We fished some of the spillovers of Devil's Lake. I say "spillovers" because the lake has spent the last decade crawling out of its natural banks and has been swallowing up the surrounding farmland. The area around the lake has some rolling landscape (unlike the area where I live, which is miles and miles of treeless land that's flat as a board), so I'm sure that from the air, the lake looks like some sort of multi-tentacled monster.

Since the lake has swallowed our old fishing spots (one of my favorites is now under twenty feet of water), we had to find new ones. One of our new favorites is where the lake has spilled into what must have been a cow pasture just a few years ago.

The bit of high land below (where there is a farmstead) is now an island with a road leading to it.

And here's the road to the farmhouse, which is surrounded by water on two sides, and after it crests the little hill where the farmstead is, it ends in water on the other side.

The picture below is the old road to one of my favorite spots. This is a high spot where the road comes back out of the water. After it crests the hill, it goes back to the lake again. You can see where the old road is under the water because the cat-tails that grew in the ditch alongside it are still there, outlining it.

And here's another fishing spot with another road going into the lake. It takes FOREVER to travel to anyplace around the lake because most of the roads have been swallowed. Sometimes you have to travel 30 miles the long way around just to get from point A to point B, even though they might be only a few miles apart.

The fishing was terrible, which is disappointing because it's so much work to get around out there. We still had fun, though. Any day outdoors is a good day.
I think my daughter spent more time chasing bugs and playing with the wildlife than fishing. The "Wooly worms" were swarming, so she spent a lot of time playing with them. Wooly worms are normally orange and black, and in Kentucky, the folklore is that you can tell how bad the winter will be by how big the orange band is.

So we didn't know what to think when we found this blond (albino?) one. We just figured the area was originally settled by Norwegian and Swedish immigrants, so this must be a Scandinavian wooly worm, lol.

Below is what wooly worms are supposed to look like. He's curled in a ball, and my photography skills are subpar, so it's not the greatest picture. But you can at least tell he's fuzzy and orange and black.

It was a good day, in spite of the poor fishing.