F*ck, it’s hot right now…
It seems like a daily occurrence that I wake up to an excessive heat warning alert on my phone.
While my memory isn’t what it should be, (likely due to the side effects of concussive heat stroke), it feels like we’ve been in this loop since at least late May or early June. Record temperatures are being approached daily. Even simple outdoor tasks, such as walking out the front door to retrieve the mail, immediately trigger back sweat. Sure, those first few drops feel nice, a ticklish cool… but it’s all downhill after that.
Look, it’s July… in Florida. It’s supposed to be hot. I get it. But this year feels a little different from the others. We’ve evidently won Lucifer’s Powerball lottery. Overnight lows of 85°, daily highs of 96°, a heat index of 108°, and of course humidity of 80%+. Every. Damn. Day.
The sick irony of that humidity number is that Mother Nature’s been stingy with the rain. At the moment, 23% of the state is in some sort of drought conditions, the worst being the little slice of South Georgia North Florida that I live in.
So all of that said, I definitely haven’t been doing much fishing since I got back from New Hampshire. And by that I mean none. Instead, I’ve been cowering inside. My whole family has. It’s prohibitive heat. If I’m being honest it’s driving me nuts. I’m generally an active person, and I’ve got a really bad fishing itch at the moment. And it doesn’t even need to be for trout.
Instead, I’d like to hit some of the neighborhood ponds and try tossing some topwater flies at the local bluegill and microbass™, despite the water levels being a good couple of feet lower than they should be. Our “little blue dots” of hot, stagnant H2O should be fishable at dusk after work this week.
Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a nice flowing creek to wet wade in, one that wasn’t swampy blackwater and home to gators and E.coli.
Hopefully, more to come…
Note: Trout a bit further north aren’t doing so well these days either…
Shenandoah National Park suspends fishing due to dry conditions