On downstream water “additives”, many moons ago I was backpacking up the course of Otter Creek in West Virginia. Most of us avoided drinking from the creek (giardia being the main concern) and would hike a bit up the canyon sides to find spring seeps to refill our water bottles. One of our party decided that this was not worth the effort and insisted the clear-looking water in the creek was “just fine”. He topped off his canteen and took a deep draft of it, pronouncing it refreshing and delicious. A few minutes further upstream we began to hear a very loud weird noise and came upon quite a spectacle: literally hundreds, maybe even thousands of frogs massed across the creek in a mass mating orgy. Anyone familiar with amphibian fertilization processes knows well what that downstream beverage he quaffed contained. He looked a bit green when he saw that and suffered quite a bit of jesting over the remainder of the trip.
No zoning in TX. Does that apply to cows too? 
Open range farm and ranch lands here. Not sure I’d like to be the one to tell a Texan landowner to keep his cattle out of the water esp at 100 degree daily temperatures. Just another part of the landscape here, plenty of other critters we we don’t eat muddying things up already
Yay, got back from Georgian Bay and I can post again!
A channel south of Byng Inlet in the still of the morning.
Everett’s in Wasilla
I love this.
Yes, but after a dinner of three flies (Blue Bottle, Greenhead, Spanish - You name it!) the boy can hop 12-foot chain link fences, croak Leonard Cohen’s complete songbook all night long (“Everybody knows the river’s tainted. Everybody’s in it for a quaff or two. Everybody shuns an amphibious landing, but nobody seems to stay within their canoe.”), AND, well, let’s just say there’s a tad more Poles now in W. VA.
CWDH: I had not seen hide nor hair of the frog grog quaffer in maybe 40 years, though I was often on backpacking and mountaineering trips with the guy back in the mid 70’s and early 80’s and knew him pretty well. He was a for-real rookie FBI agent back then, though he was such a bumbling doofus (and made such a big deal out of covertly letting single ladies in our outing club know that he was, but “don’t tell anyone”) that we figured the agency kept him around because nobody that they were trying to investigate would actually believe that he was an agent. Perfect cover!
So I looked him up just now and his LinkedIn CV popped up. An excerpt: “X is now a private consultant on security and counterterrorism matters, focusing primarily on issues involving Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). His last assignment was as Supervisor of the WMD Squad in the FBI’s New York Field Office where he was also the WMD Coordinator for the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). Mr. X also supervised the Bomb Technician, Hazardous Materials, and Operational Medical Support programs. In these capacities, he was responsible for developing, coordinating, and implementing actions to prevent acts of terrorism and for managing the investigation of terrorist incidents, threats, and hoaxes involving chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or explosive (CBRNE) materials.” So, is frog sperm a biological agent? The CV goes on at length from there…
He was a nice enough young guy back then but kind of a “Mr. Bean” (or, for anyone old enough to recall the “Li’l Abner” Sunday comics, a “Joe Btfsplk”. Among his woes: X’s best friend stole his comely wife (no great loss, she dumped that hubby number 2 just as abruptly within a couple of years for chump number 3, who fared little better): X then went on a club expedition to climb in the Argentinian Andes (his first trip to altitude) and apparently didn’t like having to have to hang his bare freezing butt over a crevasse edge to poop so he overdosed himself on meds they had along to halt the runs and ended up rendering himself incapacitated. The team was already struggling to evacuate two climbers (one of them my boyfriend at the time) who were suffering from serious frostbite on their feet and were pissed at X for making himself another burden. so one of them tied him to a foam pad and dragged him over the snow on their descent until he pulled himself together enough to motivate under his own power. The most amusing of his gaffes was what I dubbed the “Kama Sutra Tyrolean Traverse” which occurred a few months after the amphibian adventure. The club had an intro rock climbing course every fall and at one of the local cliff areas there were two steep faces facing each other across a 50’ wide and 20’ high gap so we would set up a rope across so students could practice crossing suspended from a seat sling. This was usually rather fun for all involved but that year we had a female newbie (who had evidently been dragged to the event by a well-meaning beau) who was clearly not enjoying any of these alpine antics, instead ratcheting from mild anxiety to terror. The guys running the traverse setup were oblivious to this and hooked her up anyway and sent her across without a trailing safety line.
When you hit the bottom of the rope arc on a Tyrolean you have to reach up and pull yourself hand-over-hand to the far side – easy peasy. But she stalled in the middle and panicked, crying hysterically and clinging to the rope with arms and ankle, deaf to instructions. So X, gallant that he was, decided to clip into the line himself and follow her across to pull her back. He pulled up to where she was hanging, wrapped his ankles around the rope and dropped head down, intending to pull up under her to cradle her body as he pulled them both across.
But as soon as she realized he was there and felt him dropping below she let go with her feet and hung straight down, wrapping her thighs tightly around his neck with his inverted face buried in her crotch as she continued to weep and wail. The audience for this crisis fell out in hysterics as he struggled suspended in that intimate embrace. Several wags suggested throwing a bucket of cold water on the pair – he did eventually pry himself free and after somebody tossed him a line he was able to tie to her harness and throw to the other side so she could be dragged up.
As soon as she got out of the harness at the cliff’s edge she took off and left (abandoning the boyfriend who had talked her into the adventure – he had to scavenge a ride home elsewhere.)
I think it was no great surprise that X elected to transfer to another regional FBI office after this series of public misfortunes.
Another Georgian Bay shot, pit stop on Lombiere Island near Byng Inlet. It can be a challenge finding your way through this stuff when your perspective is from two feet above the water.
Me, yesterday, just paddling out into a quiet pond in Powhatan, Virginia, at the nearby WMA (Wildlife Management Area). I had the whole place to myself! 
Cayman 124 Sit-in Fishing Kayak.
Vintage Daiwa 212 light action rod.
Vintage Daiwa 7250 light action spinning reel.
Jocassee is beautiful!
It dawns on the Dolomites,
can’t contrail all faraway.
So sit yee down by nature’s crown,
here and now enjoy new day.
