Wednesday at Lake Arrowhead

 October 21

The plan for the day was fishing again. It was still awfully windy, or so it seemed back at camp. Once we got on the water it was very calm and lovely. We crossed the lake and resumed our search for good fishing spots but just didn't find much of anything.  On the other side of the dam was another cove filled with oil derricks, so we cruised over there to see. But we soon discovered that even a light wind sweeping the surface of a fairly large lake (16,000 acres) would build up whitecaps when you least expect them.

Eventually we gave up hunting and just found a spot with a lot of fish and started fishing. The trolling motor was able to hold us in place very well, but without any underwater structure to anchor them, there was nothing to hold the fish in place.

We each caught a blue catfish. Ed's was a decent size but mine was smallish. By then the water was so choppy that the boat rocking back and forth made it hard work to try and keep our bait from jigging up and down and right out of the mouth of a snatching fish. I'm not sure that I felt a single bite for the rest of the trip.

It was clearly time to go in, but I have to admit that when we got back into our boat ramp's sheltered cove, the water was as calm as you could hope for. If we hadn't thrown out all our minnows I'd have been temped to try for another 30 minutes or so.

Funny thing...as we launched that morning, there was an egret eating discarded minnows at the boat ramp. I didn't know they ate dead things like that...I've never seen it before. On second thought, I don't think it was an egret at all--I think it was a juvenile little blue Heron. I did look at the legs, wondering if it was a Great Egret or  a Snowy...but they appeared gray-ish, not black like I'd expect.

After a late lunch Molly and I had a long walk and found this pile of rocks with a bench on top:

 

 

 

We also tried (okay, I tried) to photograph the sandpipers on the water's edge. I just couldn't get a good shot and the camera was failing to focus. Something about the humidity in combination with the angle of the sun, I guess.  I got this killdeer (front left) with five little sandpipers.

 

 

 

 

A  better picture of the sandpipers still did not reveal what species they were:

 

 

 

 

Supper for Wednesday night was a new one for camping...RV camping, that is. We made hamburgers! Wow, sounds exciting, right? Except that I had to rush back from my walk with Molly to take a quick shower and start deep-frying potatoes--yum! As many times as we've eaten charred hamburgers cooked on a rusty campground grate over a dying wood fire, and enjoyed them, we'd enjoy them a lot more on our mini barbeque grill with charcoal, accompanied by french fried potatoes.

And so we did. I may have mentioned a few trips back that we'd replaced our ancient deep fryer with a lovely little Presto Pot that could be easily transported in our Mammoth under-seat storage compartments.  The cookpot and the little fryer basket can be submerged for deep cleaning, and its electric cord and temperature control nest nicely inside.

So I chopped half of a sweet potato to go with my Boca Burger, then chopped up two russet potatoes to go with Ed's full pound of beef made into two chunky patties. I filled the little pot with peanut oil--yum, oil! and proceeded to fry right 'em all up. And thus proved a point--the only thing better than sweet potato fries with ketchup is sweet potato fries with jalapeno ketchup.