Daughter in Law Mary Grace and I went hunting over the Christmas holidays trying to add to her successful marksmanship record and to the venison supply.

The first two times she has ever pulled the trigger on a rifle were last year when she downed two pigs in quick succession. This year she was going for venison and at 10:15 on the day before Christmas she struck. By the time I got out of the stand she was on the blood trail and when I stumbled down into the cane brake she yelled “she’s over here” and had found the doe. She has a perfect record so far, Three for three. Thus the title of this post. To say I’m extremely proud of her is an understatement. We have a tradition of having venison for Christmas lunch so the doe went right on the table.

I did the traditional honors with the makeup, we loaded the doe into the jeep, carried it to Freddie, and went back to the house for a celebratory pop of Scotch. It was nothing short of a wonderful day.

Hal was going to meet me at the gate at 8:00 this morning but we both were about 20 minutes early. It was a cool ride in the Jeep to the Garhole. Hal used to invite me there to fish when we were in high school in the early 60’s. Some of the logs that were there then are still there now. We started fishing slightly after 8:30 due to the early meet. It started off very slow. Hal tried a DT-6, a jig and a drop shot. He snagged a large bream on the DT-6 , had a pickup or two on the jig, and had a lot of bream tapping his drop shot. No real bites. Since I had no bites to start off on the jig, the DT-6 got the call. Hal finally caught a couple on the jig and my DT-6 caught a few but only if you fished it slowly with stops and pauses. We reached one place that had quite a few fish. It just happened to be one of the places I caught them last time. It was very slow fishing with a lot of the fish caught on the back hook of the bait indicating how much the cool water had slowed the fish down. When we moved from the first place, we started fishing around the bank and catching one every now and then. Hal was having good luck on the jig but I was having none on that bait. We trolled over to the second spot that I thought might be good. Nothing. Then we started around another section of bank. By now it was warming up and the fish were more ready to hit the DT-6. I threw by a log and was going to let my bait crawl over it when a fish hit. I hooked the fish but it stuck the hook in the log. Hal said to give the fish slack and let it pull the bait off of the log, which it did. It was a 5 pound FOD.

Continuing around the hole the fish seemed to be biting much better. We thought it might be a good idea to return to the place they were biting so slow. When we arrived they in fact were doing better but the presentation still had to be slow. We caught a few and things slowed down so we were going to return to the nothing place hoping that maybe a school had moved up. On the way Hal caught four out of one bush with a jig. After giving the bush a good going over with no more bites we continued to the other spot. Since the bush had been so good we tried another and it was full of fish too. I threw to the bush and hung on a vine. I twitched the bait trying to get it off the vine and a fish came up and helped me out by taking it off the vine for me. By now we had caught 38 and were trying hard for 40. Hal caught number 39 that was the co-FOD at 5 pounds even. It was getting late and the trolling motor battery was just about gone so we decided to quit. Besides the two FOD’s , there was a 4 and although we didn’t weigh any I’d bet a couple of the others were 3 which would make the best 5 weigh 20 pounds. Not too shabby.