I'm starting to wonder if it's ever going to stop raining. Every week there is a new deluge. Every week I get pushed further and further back from the start of the guide season. But then I remember that we really need the rain to bring the water table up.

As part of a series that I am working on I thought it would be cool to take the time to sort of get to know some of the state's conservation groups. I have had the good fortune to get to work with a good many of them in the past year, but there was one that I had not: The Black Warrior River-keeper's.

There is something about a wooden boat that has its own mystique, its own character. Maybe it’s the way it moves in the water or the way it looks, or maybe it’s just the fact that you know they are a lost art.

So when I asked my publisher just what I should write about, his response was, “something outdoorsy other than fishing and canoeing.”

You know that you’re living the life and spending too much time in the back country when you start hunting down a water bottle to cut the top off of to scramble your eggs in.

Ah the Beltline, that subject is fairly polarizing. On one hand many people here in the state are looking forward to its construction and it’s promised benefits that we will all reap. I mean how could we turn down the notion of 70,000 new jobs around the Birmingham area?

I love this place. It’s off the beaten path and so pristine it hurts. Now the place I’m talking about is the Kathy Stiles Freeland, Bibb County Glades Preserve.

Zane Grey once wrote, “if I only fished to capture fish, my fishing trips would have ended long ago.” I have to agree, I feel the same. And it’s not very often that a fishing trip turns into something that exemplifies this point so well.