An attempt at making spring last

The other day I received a phone call from an old friend of mine who moved to New Brunswick a few years back. He informed me he has finally acquired his guide’s licence and invited me to visit him this spring to fish for striped bass.

This is an offer that is very hard to refuse. And yet I probably will pass on it.

You see, as much as I’d like to visit my friend and fly fish for those great game fish during the peak of their run, spring is too short and there are already too many things for the outdoors enthusiast to do. My dance card is especially full this spring.

I already have plans in place for turkey hunting and a brook trout fishing canoe trip. There’s also time slated for ice-out lake and rainbow trout fishing, chasing pike, a spring bear hunt, welcoming and training a new springer spaniel puppy as well as a work conference. Somewhere in all that, I also have to fit in my family life and daily work too.

So, frankly, there are only two options for me if I want to go striper fishing. I could either cancel one or more of my current scheduled activities or invent a rudimentary time machine.

Thus far, I am only in the research and development phase.

To be clear, I am not formally trained as a scientist. In my favour, however, I have watched Back to the Future several times and also recognize the importance of a flux capacitor – which, unless I am mistaken, is more than half the battle.

I won’t lie to you. There have been a few setbacks.

For one thing, my test subjects are cats. And working with cats is not easy.

No matter how much catnip you give them, they have a natural aversion to wearing tinfoil helmets and running backwards on treadmills.

Also, I currently have no way of communicating with them to find out if they have indeed gone back in time. For all I know, they could have been chased by velociraptors, which would probably explain why they get nervous whenever I get the tinfoil helmets and catnip out.

I would work with mice, but, as I said, I have cats, so that could be messy. I am not an idiot.

That’s why I fashioned a tinfoil helmet for myself. If my calculations are correct, my initial experiments would send me back precisely three seconds in time. This doesn’t seem like a lot until you pull the trigger on a turkey and miss or set the hook two seconds late on a good fish. Then, going back three seconds in time is all a hunter or angler could wish for.

Here are my scientific notes from this morning.

7:05 am and 30 seconds: Donned my tinfoil helmet and ran backwards on the treadmill. Interestingly enough, catnip has a much more pleasant flavour than I expected. 7:07 am and 27 seconds: I am wheezing and my head is getting sweaty.

7:07 am and 32 seconds: I’m done.

A lot of people might give up at this point and resign themselves to the fact that striped bass fishing is not in the cards this year. I am not one of those people though.

As far as I know, my method has not had any adverse effects on me at all. Therefore, I will continue to experiment until I make a breakthrough. Right after, I finish playing with this ball of yarn.