When my plane landed in Butte on wednesday night the temp. was minus seven. Talk about a bit of shock to the system. I hurried out to look for my Jeep which the girls had dropped off earlier in the day at the airport parking lot. There I was running around the lot wearing clothes suited for Andros Island. I finally found it and then discovered the drivers side door was froze shut. I got in the other side, started it and let it run to warm up and went back in the terminal. If someone was going to steal it, I didn’t care I was freezing. It has been said that in order to kill the Japanese pine beetle you need severe cold weather. I think this winter in Montana the little buggers are gonna wish they were back in Japan.
While in Andros I met a couple who were originally from Billings, Mt. They were spending the winter on their boat which was tied up at the marina across the channel. I invited them to go along one day on the skiff to look for some bonefish. While walking this particular flat near the shore I spotted several sea crabs and one fairly large one. Bob’s wife said she wanted it for dinner so Bob said he would poke it with his fly rod and it would latch onto it and he would drag it in and grap it. I was a bit skeptical about this idea but he acted like he had done this before and was very confident it would work. He poked it with his rod and it latched on all right, it instantly snipped off about eight inches of the tip of his new orvis rod. I wish I had a camera to capture the look on his face as he surveyed the tip dangling on his line. I could only contain myself for a couple seconds before I almost wet my pants laughing. After his initial disdain about his broken rod, he looked at me and said, “now that was a really stupid thing to do” and he and his wife both started laughing. I’m not sure what the proper technique is for catching these things but using a $600 fly rod is not an option.