I am honored and humbled to find out that River Goat Kayak Adventures was nominated for the 2016 Kayak Anglers Choice Awards. If you are a fan click on the link and give it a vote. Thank you.

http://www.yakangler.com/choice

Nomad, Gypsy,Wanderer...the Soul of the Fisherman

Not all who wander are lost.  JRR Tolkien

In two weeks I will wander. Nothing new to me...I've been wandering since I was a kid. I like it...with or without company...with or without a goal.

This trip will have a goal and that's to win the Hobie/IFA redfish tour stop in Ruskin Fl...steep odds for a creek chubb fisherman from Silver Creek Ga. I'll have 8 days to find an area that has big reds and trout. The greatest combined length of your biggest red and trout take the trophy...and the money. I feel confident about finding fish but its gonna take some luck to outfish the locals, it always does.

I'll pack my Subaru with my camping gear, load my Jackson Big Rig with more fishing gear than I could ever need, kiss my lady and head south.

Ruskin Florida is just south of Tampa and Tampa bay holds loads of big trout and redfish but it also holds snook, tarpon, jacks and mangrove snapper...just to name a few.

My plan is to "wander" from North to South on the bay searching for my tournament day fishing spot, when I find the trout and reds, I'll shift gears. Tarpon under dock lights, snook in the mangroves...snapper, pompano, I'm not going to be picky. Heck, Miami is only 4 hours and the Everglades are even closer than that...maybe one overnight down there to try the flats for a bone fish or the Miami canals for a peacock bass...all from my kayak, fishing hole to fishing hole, all by myself. Living a week according to the tides and the bite...Yea, I'll take some of that.

I thank God for my wife that urges me to chase my passion, a brain that hasn't changed very much since age 13 and for the guy that prayed for a direction and God told him ... "Make a little plastic boat."   Peace

Jackson Kayak Fishing Blog: Paddle to your Island Paradise 25 Aug2015

...just the thought of paddling out to an island to camp and fish would put a smile on most faces.

The latest article that I wrote for the Jackson Kayak Fishing Blog . This is what I'm most passionate about and I hope you enjoy it. Peace

Link: http://jacksonkayak.com/blog/2015/08/25/paddle-island-paradise-pt-1/

Georgia's Grand Cathedrals pt1

This series will feature some of Georgia's most beautiful places, at least that I've seen. I hope you enjoy them.

Georgia is a hot bed for outdoorsman. It doesn't matter if you paddle, hike, fish or hunt...this state has the finest to offer in some of the most pristine areas around. I'll start this with my favorite place in the state...Little Tybee Island. The fishing is good, there are clams to dig and the island is virtually untouched by civilization. It has a vast maritime forest to explore that looks straight out of an old Tarzan movie. The beach, besides the little bit of trash, looks no different than it did when the Yamassee indians  fished and hunted there 500 years ago.
If you like to camp, fish and wish to visit a truly magical place, you have to give this place a visit.
Do your homework... I planned every trip through information I got off of the internet. I called local paddle shops for shuttle information.(fyi:parking on Tybee Island is outrageous but its free outside the city limits and the paddle shop will have info on that) You'll need to take enough water and food for the trip. Bug repellent is a good ...no, great idea to take along and make sure you have suitable camping gear for the coastal winds and storms that may pop up.
This island is raw nature...it doesn't care if you're there or not. As beautiful as it is it can definitely bite back so, show her great respect by planning appropriately, tread lightly, leave no trace and enjoy the magic. Peace
This is a video I made from my last trip to Little Tybee.

Ep 3: Perfect Fishing Buddies...adventure!

As a kid it was always ghost stories, pretend adventures and fishing with my next "Perfect Fishing Buddy"...

He was 10 and attempted to shoot an ORANGE off of his brother's head with a bow and arrow. Confidence oozed as he drew the bow, anchored and released...almost on target. The metal tipped target arrow struck his little brother just outside his eyesocket creating a scary but superficial wound. I got to watch an epic asswhooping of mass proportions seconds after his mother heard of her archer son's attempt....he is my most adventurous fishing buddy, he's a bit more prepared for the task at hand than he was that day in my back yard 39 years ago. But, he'll still sling a proverbial arrow from time to time just to see where it lands.
On our first kayak fishing trip we paddled 19 miles on lake Blue Ridge setting the bar for our version of adventure. We didn't catch a single fish and were both worn out but we enjoyed every single minute of the 14 hours on the water.

Since that day I have fished, paddled and camped in 4 states with him. Nothing has been easy, its required extensive planning, creative logistics and a lot of luck. I've seen him catch his first walleye, biggest smallmouth and biggest trout. He was there with me when I landed my first Suwannee bass that was also my 31st freshwater fish species from a kayak in a year. He has a great eye with a camera and when it comes to computers, he is a master at online scouting and recon of potential areas to visit.

 We've camped in some of the most remote and beautiful places I've ever seen. We hiked into Ellico'ts Rock Wilderness area with the Polar Vortex of 2014 bearing down on us with the main intent of testing our camping gear. -3 degrees were met with confidence and anticipation the second night of our trip and we emerged unscathed and actually had fun.

We paddled over a mile across Tybee inlet to one of Georgia's uninhabited barrier islands, Little Tybee, bushwhacked to it's heart, set camp and claimed her ours for 3 days.

We repelled a well planned attack from a gangly band of racoons on our camp at Little Tybee island without a single drop of blood being shed.

We've had tornadic storms pass over while camping in one of the most remote areas of the Cohutta Wilderness and he's never said anything but that he's ready for the next trip.

We floated Florida's Santa Fe river for 3 days stopping to camp in the jungle like setting each evening all while witnessing some of the most beautiful flora and fauna along with bizarre river features (sinks and rises)we'd ever seen.

With the amount of time we've spent on the water and in the woods we were bound to see some extremely rare sites...a fish eating snake on the Chattahoochee, a hitchhiking squirell on Carter's Lake and a mysterious large footprint along the banks of the Conasauga river in the middle of the Cohutta Wilderness.

There has been some minor casualties...my count is 3 lost fishing rod and reels and 2 broken ones, several on the run gear repairs and a hellacious case of giardia (probably caused by the combination of a faulty water purifier and a heaping pile of fresh bear mess located next to the spring 100 yards up the hill from our camp). My poor car is a 2014 model and has almost 30,000 miles on it (at least half of that has been fishing/camping trips), I currently have 4 fishing reels in the shop being rebuilt and another two that needs it yet none of these things have deterred us from the next adventure. Like the postman...come hell or high water we're gonna hit the woods.

He loves and respects nature as much as I do and I will admit that I probably wouldn't have visited half of the places I did if not for him. We witnessed God's creation on a level that many only dream of...not from a car window but actually feeling it, tasting it and down right wallowing in it for days on end....thank God for little plastic boats.

What lies ahead? Who knows, we've talked about several trips including the Flint River and the Collins in Tennessee for the immediate future and paddling the Grand Loop(Google it) after retirement or if we stay alive long enough. But whatever it may be, my buddy will be willing, prepared and ready to go. While shooting an apple off of someone's head with a bow is a daring feat he's gonna find an orange to nail. Peace

The Polar Vortex is coming...let's go play!

Last year a close friend of mine and I had been planning a camping trip for some time. We both had done a ton of research on a lake high in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina and we were stoked and ready. Our plan was to go to Lake Nantahala, load our kayaks with camping and fishing gear for 3 nights on an island in the lake. This lake has intrigued me since the 90's, that's when my brother gave me the book "Trout Fishing Southern Appalachia" by Jimmy Jacobs as a Christmas gift. In it Mr. Jacobs mentions that Lake Nantahla has Kokanee salmon and he explains that the state stocked them as forage for the other predator fish in the lake. Since reading that book I have dreamed of catching those salmon and cooking them over a fire...we were set to go and January the third couldn't get here soon enough. If you don't know, part of the waiting game for any fishing or camping trip is watching the weather,as a matter of fact, it's probably the most important part of the trip. As my long weekend got closer the weather forecast was getting bad. The lake sits at over 3000' in elevation and an arctic blast was bearing down on the southeast. Temps in the negative numbers with a wind chill of minus 20 and up to 8 inches of snow were being predicted for Topton NC, the closest town to the lake and that's at the bottom of the mountain. God only knows what the top would get. We still contemplated going but I had to be back to work on the following Wednesday and any warmup wasn't expected until the folowing Thursday. With that information and a risk of being snowed in on a mountain top lake that is a virtual ghost town in winter we started brainstorming for other options...we were going into the woods, no matter what the weather channel was saying, we just had to decide on the place. We both had different systems we used for camping, I sleep in a hammock and Sherill uses a 1 man bivy tent. Neither of us had ever tested our gear in this type of extreme cold weather that was forecasted and this was going to be our only chance to do it without having to drive to a more traditionally cold state like ...Maine. As 3 January 2014 closed in on us we settled on leaving our kayaks at home and hiking into Ellicot's Rock wilderness area. This place is in the extreme northeast corner of Georgia and has the Chatooga river running through it...a world class trout stream. It was still going to be cold but the snow band wasn't supposed to travel that far east. We would camp on the South Carolina side of the river about 2 miles in, which would put us about a mile south of the spot where Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina all meet. This spot is marked by a rock that has the longitude and latitude chiseled on it by John Ellicot, the government surveyor that mapped these states borders back in the early 1800's. I discovered this river also while reading the book, "Trout streams of Southern Appalachia". I'm very familiar with this awesome place and have hiked in, fished and camped there a dozen or more times. The river holds a healthy population of stream bred brown trout and the setting reminds me of an ancient medieval forest with giant hemlocks a hundred foot tall. On the third of January we drove to the parking area for Ellicot's Rock, loaded all of our gear on our backs and hiked in. The weather was actually nice with temps reaching 50 degrees but we knew what the weatherman had said and we set about gathering more firewood than we thought we'd need and getting our shelters set up. This was a fun fishing trip on the surface but at the heart of it was a test of our equipment and second...our own skills as woodsmen. If disaster struck we had an easy out which was a shor hike back to the car but that was only a last resort. On day two we woke up to cooler temperatures but nothing abnormal, we ate breakfast and set out alone to fish. By mid afternoon the temps had dropped drastically into the 20's and by 4 o'clock my fishing line was freezing on the spool and the 3 fish I'd kept were frozen solid. Back at camp we had built the fire ring up on one side so it would reflect the heat and skewered our fish on sticks to roast over the fire. At 8 pm that night I set my phone a good distance away from our camp so I could get an accurate reading on it's built in thermometer...it later read 8 degrees. This cold front had a name and we soon would realize that "Polar Vortex" perfectly described what was in store for us. As I mentioned earlier, I sleep in a hammock and I had little information on if it could be set up for a comfortable night's sleep in these bitter cold temperatures so I used what I thought would work. First, I chose a spot right next to one of those felled giant hemlocks. I decided on the south side of the trunk, shielding me from the north winds. When hanging my hammock I made sure to place it very close to the ground, so close that when I was in it there was only about 6 inches between me and the ground. Inside I placed my thermarest pad and one of my two sleeping bags...a 0 degree bag, on top of that for added insulation, the other bag with a 20 degree rating, would be what I would sleep inside of while wearing fleece long johns, wool socks and a wool beanie. I could shed these clothes if it was too much but it would be hell having to get up to put them on if needed. That night it was brutally cold and I heard wind make the most eery sounds as it blew down the gorge we were camped in, it was high pitched almost like a whistle and at 3 a.m. I woke up and had to pee...I didn't want to get up because I was actually comfortable and had been sleeping like a baby, now I had to get out into the coldest weather in 50 years. I made quick work out of this dilemma... I was out, relieved and back in at a record time. I noticed Sherill snoring and thought of it as a good thing because it meant he wasn't frozen to death and his sleep system was working also. We awoke to a sunny 2 degree morning, broke camp and headed out. The trail hugs the river almost the whole length of it and it had been so cold that slush was flowing in the water...one bend of the river, over half of it was choked with ice. Back at the parking lot we were happy to be back in a warm car and headed for home but I believe we were most excited that with our trip's success, because of our planning and equipment we pulled this adventure off without feeling any ill effects from the weather. We knew for a fact that in a worst case scenario we could handle extreme cold temps...even a "Polar Vortex".