Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Spirit of Moonpie and I spent Oct. 18-20 on the Blackwater below Franklin. The water was low, 57 degrees and getting pretty stagnant from lack of rain. Air temps ranged from 42 to 74. Trash was not terrible, I picked up about seven pounds. I saw no other water quality issues, and there were no derelict limb lines.

This was the first land-based trip of the year, and it started out great with a bald eagle leading the way soon after I left the boat landing. I’m always apprehensive of the first trip out after transitioning from summer pontoon camping to winter land-based trips. But everything went pretty well, and I only forgot a couple of minor items… hand wipes in the boat, ugh!

The catfishing was pretty good. I caught seven on the limb lines to 10 pounds. I only set eight this time to keep them close to camp. I lost two, and evidently one was a very large cat, as it broke the fairly robust green limb I had it attached to. The cats were caught on bream and catfish. I might start trying to use more catfish as bait on the second night from now on. It stays on the hook better than bream. I use the top of the cat right under the dorsal fin after fileting. That meat is usually yellow with cat fat and will put an oily sheen in the water if squeezed. Cat on cat!

I had an interesting happening the first night at camp. I kept hearing something in the woods that kept circling around the camp. It would never come close enough for me to see, but I could hear twigs snapping and leaves rustling… enough so I had to put my main sidearm back on. Anyway, the next morning I went to check on my target range, and one of the beer cans I had set up was crushed flat and had hundreds of little teeth marks on it. I would guess it was a coon since we don’t have Wolverines here, hhhaaa, but I just never figured a coon could crush a beer can like that. I guess it really likes Coors. The little 22s I shoot out there at night for my gun war game I guess weakened the can enough from all the holes. Those bullets do not have powder in them, just the primer propels the 22-grain bullet, hardly making any noise. I have pellet guns that are more powerful, as these bullets only zing out at 500 feet per second. 

This was the first trip with my new campfire setup also. For the past 40 years or so, I have had a regular ol’ fire pit with bricks that I have found in the river used as a wind block. That’s a lot of smoke I’ve inhaled all those years, and it has taken a toll on my lungs. So, I decided to try one of those smokeless fire pits on the river. I have a huge one at home that works great, so I decided to try a small one for camping. Man, I couldn’t believe how nice that thing worked. I chose the YEFU 18-inch from Amazon mostly because it’s made so you can see the fire through it. That’s the one thing I don’t like about my big SOLO smokeless stove I have at home… you can’t see the fire very well. Well this YEFU is awesome. Drop some blocks of wood in it and it burns; no poking, no prodding, it just burns. It’s almost too hands off; I mean I’m a fire bug and love messing with the fire, and after 40-some years, I’m good at it. This stove packs down pretty small and has a carrying case. The only thing about this is you have to have wood that is like less than 13 inches to fit in it. So, I had to chainsaw my wood in half that I had at home before I went camping… hence the blocks of wood I referred to earlier. Heck, round wood would be the ticket. Also it burns a little more wood than I would normally burn, but that’s the cost of no smoke, I reckon. 

Hopefully I can find someone that will bring me a load of 12-inch wood for next year… that is if I’m still around and hopefully able to continue to visit the two rivers we call the Blackwater and Nottoway.

Jeff Turner is the Blackwater Nottoway RiverGuard. To contact him about river issues, send him an email at blknotkpr@earthlink.net. He can also be followed on the Blackwater Nottoway RiverGuard Facebook page. Search for “Blackwater Nottoway RiverGuard” on Facebook.