Bike and Beyond...: June 2009

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Pain in the Bass!

My roommates and I recently started fishing. I'm talking all out, bought all the gear, and we paddle around and try to catch bass with fake bait. Here is a picture of our usual nerdy getup, it also happens to be the first Bass I caught.

It ends up that it IS pretty hard to catch fish. There is a massive amount of skill involved, despite what many think. Eventually, Eli, after massive amounts of online research and scanning Google Earth found a great lake up in the hills. He test fished it and caught tons of bass.

One weekend we packed up our stuff and off we went off to the lake. It was perfect fishing weather, cloudy. I actually really enjoyed it because it was a beautiful site seeing the clouds over the lake and hills.

That's how the day started, we all caught a fish pretty early on and were excited to work our way around the lake fishing the entire shore. About half way around the lake I cast off a large rock out into the deeper water. I'm reeling in my bait like a pro, then BAM something hits it hard. I wait a sliiiiggght second then... SET THE HOOK! I've got a fighter on the line. I reel it in, and as I'm about to grab it's lower lip to take the hook off, it struggles and falls to the ground. I'm mostly worried about getting it back into the water so I reach down to grab it, and it struggles again, stabbing my finger with it's spiny dorsal fin. Eventually, I get it back in and it swims off.

Derrick with the largest fish of the day, and a close up of the part of the fish that stabbed me.

Because I am always a jokester, I joke with Eli and Derrick about being stung by the Bass quill. And like clock work they start making fun of me for complaining about a little cut on my finger. We fish on though the day, catching lots of fish and having fun.

Here is what happened in the aftermath of that day, which by the way was April 29th.
My finger kinda slowly healed, but continued to bother me to some extent. It also was forming a sort of blister/bump.
So today I decided I better get to the bottom of this. I busted out my trusty pocket knife and started digging around in my finger. Guess what eventually shot right out? A bass "quill"!! And yes I took pictures, and I'm saving it to show my roommates after all the crap they gave me. Here is the pictures showing you the events:

The wound site after almost a month of healing, I knew something was up!

This is the puppy that popped out of my finger.

Another angle

Labels: Bass, bass fishing, bass spikes, fishing

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Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Honda Fit and my MPG

If anyone is looking for a new or used car, I recommend the Honda Fit. I know I've already talked about this here, but I wanted to go over it again because of the recent events with the auto industry.

Ever since I purchased my iPhone I've been using a great free app called Gas Chubby It keeps detailed track of many different stats, but most importantly my gas millage. I love stats, especially when they are from something I do everyday, like drive my car.

Since Nov 26, 2008 I've been keeping very close track of my gas and service costs with this application. The coolest feature I found was the graphs. Most of you may or may not know that the way you drive can drastically effect your gas millage. And you can clearly see by the MPG graph that it's true. The dip in the MPG was from a tank of gas in which I drove on the highway going 80 not 70 and thats the only change I made in my driving. I am pretty sure that if I drive conservatively enough I can get my MPG up to 40! I'll let you know if I hit it.

It's interesting to see how the price of gas in San Diego has crept up slowly but steadily after the recent decline. But we are still better off then drivers in Europe who pay around $8.50 a gallon!

I feel like all of this reinforces what has happened recently to the US auto industry. They missed the bandwagon on small fuel efficient cars like the Honda Fit. When such a model was available from a US manufacturer the public usually considered them low quality. And I must admit, when I was researching cars I test drove all the subcompact models, including US companies. So why did I go with the Honda? The number one reason was I knew it would last. I also felt like it was the only one solidly built, had the most features and power, on top of having great gas millage.